European Journal of Turkish Studies Social Sciences on Contemporary Turkey

18 | 2014 (Hi)stories of Honor in Ottoman Societies Controversies, Continuities, and New Directions

Tolga Uğur Esmer, Başak Tuğ and Noémi Lévy-Aksu (dir.)

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejts/4786 DOI: 10.4000/ejts.4786 ISSN: 1773-0546

Publisher EJTS

Electronic reference Tolga Uğur Esmer, Başak Tuğ and Noémi Lévy-Aksu (dir.), European Journal of Turkish Studies, 18 | 2014, « (Hi)stories of Honor in Ottoman Societies » [Online], Online since 03 February 2014, connection on 13 March 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ejts/4786 ; DOI : https://doi.org/ 10.4000/ejts.4786

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EDITOR'S NOTE

This issue collects some of the topics discussed during the workshop "Honor in Ottoman and Contemporary Mediterranean Societies: Controversies, Continuities and New Directions" which took place at the Central European University in Budapest on March 21-23, 2013.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contextualizing Honour Nükhet Sirman

Honor, Reputation, and Reciprocity Leslie Peirce

Gendered Subjects in Ottoman Constitutional Agreements, ca. 1740-1860 Başak Tuğ

The Precarious Intimacy of Honor in Late Ottoman Accounts of Para-militarism and Banditry Tolga Uğur Esmer

An Honorable Break from Besa: Reorienting Violence in the Late Ottoman Mediterranean Isa Blumi

Building Professional and Political Communities: The Value of Honor in the Self- Representation of Ottoman Police during the Second Constitutional Period Noémi Lévy-Aksu

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Contextualizing Honour

Nükhet Sirman

1 The papers in this issue represent an attempt by historians to tackle the concept of honour and its practice in the Ottoman Empire, from the sixteenth to the turn of the twentieth century. The concept itself has had numerous academic as well as political ramifications for a long time. As maintained by Lévy-Aksu in her contribution, historians’ intervention in the academic discourse on honour, shows the extent to which the content, context and uses of the concept have changed over time. This comes as an important corrective both to the anthropological and political uses to which the term has been put.

2 While anthropologists in the 1960s and 1970s used the concept to try and define a unified field they would call the Anthropology of the Mediterranean, many feminists in the very countries that this anthropology defined took to the streets ten to fifteen years later, this time to construct a unified feminist politics. While the anthropologists maintained that honour was a way of producing hierarchy in the absence of a strong state presence, feminists claimed that it was a way of keeping women in their place. What both of these different camps maintained was, to a large extent, correct but still flawed. They were flawed in the sense that they gave a single content to a concept that had multiple meanings, used in different contexts in very different ways, and they were flawed to the extent that they fixed this content once and for all. They did not explain where this concept came from, how it had changed over time, and the conditions which produced it. 3 Peirce’s contribution to this volume indicates that the polysemy with which the concept of honour can be historically associated does not stretch all the way to the sixteenth century. Her argument to the effect that the concept of honour was not used much in court cases at that time is qualified by the introduction of the term reputation, and especially, its opposite, töhmet, blemishing someone’s reputation. Yet by the end of the eighteenth century the term “violation of honour” (hetk-i ‘ırz) becomes quite widespread in courts and refers particularly to issues of sexuality as shown by Tuğ. In between, it seems to be used to “integrate” groups, individuals and communities into larger entities. Here, honour seems to serve as an ethos that helped in the creation of trans-regional networks of violence as argued by Esmer.

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4 The relation of honour to violence is also stressed by Blumi in his discussion of its uses by Ottoman officials of Albanian origin in depicting “other” Albanians, those living in the north, often resuscitating old traditions with a view to control local violence. Here too, then, honour is both personal, as in oaths of loyalty, but also serves political goals that have to do with producing modern forms of rule in line with Ottoman reforms of the nineteenth century. But, as Tuğ argues, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also assigns importance to regulating interpersonal violence, this time as a way of forging a “reciprocal relationship between the state and the subjects” based on legitimacy and justice. Honour is now at the service of the creation of a new, gendered, notion of citizenship, one that nevertheless harks back to the terms established by the earlier notions of “Circle of Justice.” Increasingly, honour seems to be attached in courts to the conjugal family through what Tuğ calls “the partnership of the patriarchal state and the male subjects.” Towards the end of the nineteenth century and up until the establishment of the Republic, honour was put to what Lévy-Aksu describes as “multidimensional uses” by the newly established institution of the police, that serve to include and exclude, but that also introduces new uses such as accountability and legitimacy. 5 Even this brief overview of the contributions here attests to the existence of a wide array of ways in which honour was deployed both by the Ottomans as well as by the researchers. It seems to have been applied to men on top of the state hierarchy, as well as to brigands, to ordinary men as well as policemen, to individuals as well as the state or one of its institutions such as the police. It seems to have led to violence or to have stopped it, to accuse as well as to defend, in court as well as in the house or in the street. Researchers themselves also use different concept to define the ways honour is practiced: a masculine ethos (Esmer), codes of behavior (Blumi), a central value (Lévy- Aksu), a rhetoric (Tuğ), and a relational phenomenon that serves to validate (Peirce). 6 In spite of this variety and knowing full well that as an anthropologist, I risk to reintroduce immutability, I would still like to hazard some generalizations on the basis of the foregoing and in view of my own work on the subject (Sirman 2004). I would like to propose that we look at honour as a way of dealing with relationships that are ambiguous, ill-defined and therefore relations that produce anxiety. Although these relations may indeed help to define state- subject or state- citizen relations, and even though they may serve as a way of governing society, they are primarily carried out at the personal level. They thus help to agonistically define relations between persons who are intimate but in an unstructured relationship where there are no hard and fast rules to adhere to so that hierarchies remain fluid and changing. 7 Not all that the anthropology of the Mediterranean said about honour was useless; on the contrary, a reformulation of some its main tenets can be helpful. The anthropology of the Mediterranean argued that honour could be found in communities that existed in state societies, but which were at the margins of these states. I would like to take this insight, qualifying it at the same time. I propose to look at these margins, not as defining a particular area but as a kind of space that defines its own type of social relations. The frontier is one example of such a space, zones around borders. What is interesting is that social relations in such spaces are less constructed than relations that make up the centre of power and sociality. For example, in Söke where much of the months of October and November are spent in the cotton fields picking cotton, people become more rowdy than in the village. Jokes are more daring, unmarried girls

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speak up more courageously. It is a space which is less delineated by hierarchical relations and codes of respect that keep these hierarchies in place. 8 Another way to think of these spaces would be to consider Victor Turner’s notion of communitas (Turner 1977). Communitas, or anti-structure, as Turner describes it, is the sort of mutual recognition that takes place during ritual processes in what Turner calls liminal spaces. These are spaces devoid of the structuring of society where new ideas, new configurations of social relations can be invented and crises thereby be solved. Liminality as described by Turner is “a ‘moment in and out of time,’ and in and out of secular social structure, which reveals, however fleetingly, some recognition (in symbol if not always in language) of a generalized social bond that has ceased to be and has simultaneously fragmented into a multiplicity of structural ties (p.96). Liminal space is a space where what it means to be social for the people concerned can be faced; a space, where, for example, the meaning of masculinity and femininity can be deciphered without the trappings of everyday exigencies, definitions, and understandings. And yet liminal spaces are also dangerous and uncharted, where encounters can quickly become violent. Turner argues that encounters in this space take place without recourse to social position or privilege; persons encounter each other as the human being that is culturally relevant. Thus masculinity and its most common definition becomes the ground on which men will interact, as Esmer describes for the Ottoman bandits of the late seventeenth century. 9 Anthropologists also argued that relations of honour are interpersonal and relational. I suggest that this personalism needs to be carefully considered. To begin with, relations that are personal need not necessarily be face-to-face. When an Ottoman subjects petitions the ruler, he is, from his point of view, writing to a person, rather than an impersonal institution. Şerif Mardin (1991) develops the term personalistic society to talk about a social imaginary where everyone occupies a unique place and where the uniqueness of this person is recognized by others who are in contact with them. It is a way of carrying out social relations, not in terms of the function that the person executes, but in terms of the recognition of the person in his or her totality. I have argued elsewhere that it is kinship terms and the imaginary produced by a kinship- based society that allows this recognition of uniqueness, or of the total person (Sirman 2006). This is because kinship is a question of hierarchies, of who calls whom “elder brother”, thus of knowing one's place. To use these kinship terms requires intimacy, but only the intimacy that allows to know each person’s relative standing vis-à-vis one another. It is the “sense”, in Bourdieu’s understanding, of recognizing hierarchy like the Albanians described by Blumi, who know who is civilized and who is savage (Bourdieu 1977) . We are therefore talking about the intimacy of rivals who shall have to compete in order to remain equal, or to keep the relative standing they are in. Honour, as also described by Bourdieu, is the route through which this rivalry is carried out on a daily basis in personalistic societies among people whose place is not well- defined by existing hierarchies. This would be the case in situations of liminality. 10 Charles Taylor, in another attempt to fix the place and meaning of honour, maintains that in traditional societies of the ancient regime, the worth of a person was measured according to the notion of honour while in modern individualistic societies, it is the notion of human dignity that does the same thing (1994). Honour is a relation that may exist between persons as well as communities of persons such as families, clans, neighbourhoods, villages, nations, ethnic groups, and religious communities. As

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maintained by Taylor, the competition between these entities night turn into a zero- sum game whereby the more honourable one group is, the less the other. Taylor uses a traditional/modern dichotomy to define the different ways in which societies will define the category of the person. I suggest that when we take that dichotomy away and say that there are certain spaces in all societies where at any given moment relations between the interlocutors are ambiguous, ill-defined, in need of being clarified through competition. It is in these spaces that this notion of honour would work to define the worth of a person vis-à-vis another person. 11 The workshop from which the papers in this volume are drawn included a number of papers on honour drawn from present-day Turkey. All of them show the extent to which interpersonal relations are resolved through appeals to notions of honour. There are times when central Anatolia is less regulated by the centre and behaves like a frontier, and times when the Balkans is in this state. The papers also show that these ambiguous relations that lead to competition may exist between state officials when competition is fomented by the centre to determine who the better governor is. Peirce’s paper shows that a person’s worth is made visible through the operation of reputation. Reputation is conferred by others and expresses a delicate balance within the community. In many examples the issue is one of masculinity, that is, the ability to protect, which quickly turns into the ability to control. 12 Historians show us that honour operates between the state and the subject as these relations become more and more contested. The more these relations undergo transformation, the more a space of ambiguity develops, the more there is room for the operation of honour. The papers also show that honour as a concept can change itself. It can be appropriated by state officials to better govern as shown by Blumi and Esmer. It can also be centralized and codified, and the workings of the state may get to be carried out under its terms, as the state undergoes transformation as shown by Tuğ and Lévy-Aksu. As gender relations become the target and the means of a new regime of government, its associations with masculinity and femininity allows it to be further sexualized (as is the case when a new conjugal unit is legally created) and genderized (as is the case when a new unit of law and order such as the professional police is created). 13 The main point is that we need to understand honour as something that is done as opposed to something that is. In other words, honour does not refer to a rule that is applied but a concept that has many uses. That is exactly what the authors in this volume have stressed using different concepts such as code, rhetoric, value and ethos as analytical tools. One such term that I have found useful is the term ‘root paradigm’ that has been introduced by Şerif Mardin in his study of Bediüzzaman Said Nursi and the way in which religious social change takes place in Turkey (1989). Taking the term from Victor Turner (1977) to mean “clusters of meaning which serve as cultural ‘maps’ for individuals” that “enable persons to find a path in their own culture,” Mardin argues that Said Nursi was able to appeal to a large number of people when ‘customs and rules’ have lost their legitimacy and no longer serve as guides for behavior (Mardin 1991:3). It is under such circumstances, circumstances that spell a state of liminality, that these root paradigms affect the way persons behave. According to Mardin, honour is one such root paradigm, but there are others such as ghāzī, hürmet and kanaat that form a cluster of meanings and provide “lines of force which shape social relations and at the same time enable these to be transformed” (Mardin 1991:5).

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14 Thus, following Mardin and Turner, I would like to argue that honour as a root paradigm that allows a doing, that is, a performative act, can be and is used to change and/or give a particular direction to existing social relations. So the question is to trace the differential operations of honour in spaces that are, or are becoming, undefined. What we see from the contributions here is that as a performative, the term has been primordialized, moralized and sacralized by successive operations it has undergone at the hands of various actors, including social scientists. The circumstances under which the term is put to use change its operation and scope. As a polysemic root paradigm, it seems from the reading of these texts that honour does lend itself to being centralized by the state. As states increasingly lose their claim to legitimacy, the moralization of the concept may serve as a way of reclaiming this legitimacy. Through various means, doing honour opens up a space for the intervention of more and more organized powers so that not only families but states, courts, the police may also do honour in situations of uncertainty. This type of appropriation by a locus of power is effected by placing its main emphasis on one of the many meanings associated with it. 15 Being such a useful root paradigm, the term has continued to be used by different claimants to hegemony. To follow the vicissitudes of the term also shows that each appropriation also prepares for another reading of the term that will subvert this hegemony. Thus, in the twentieth century, honour as a paradigm has worked as a way of creating difference between the immoral colonizer and the colonized. Or, it has been cast as a primordial relation, thus relegating those who use it to the status of the primitive and backward. Thus, judges in Turkey, but also in places like Sweden who see it as a sign of a backward culture judge their cases according to the place the polity wants to open for difference and multiculturalism. But then many Kurds in Turkey will vote for a particular political party on the basis of their honour, thus subverting the power of the central state. Similarly, in circumstances where the changes brought about by modernism, work and poverty turn the family into an undefined space, feminists who target the concept of honour as a cultural construct that serves the subordination of women end up by sexualizing and moralizing it themselves. 16 As an affective term that has been acting as a root paradigm in circumstances of uncertainty, the concept of honour, as shown by the contributions to this volume, show the different contexts in which it has been put to use and the kinds of effects such usage has produced. In this brief introduction, I have suggested that the best way to explain the tenacity as well as the variations in its meanings and usages is to consider it as a root paradigm that helps overcome periods of uncertainty, albeit for a limited period of time.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bourdieu, Pierre (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Mardin, Şerif (1989) Religion and Social Change in Modern Turkey: The Case of Bediüzzaman Said Nursi, Albany, State University of New York Press.

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Mardin, Şerif (1991) ‘The Just and the Unjust’, Daedalus 120 (3), pp. 113-129.

Sirman, Nükhet (2004) ‘Kinship, Politics and Love: Honour in Post-Colonial Contexts’, in Mojab, Shahrzad; Abdo, Nahla (eds.), Violence in the Name of Honour: Theoretical and Political Challenges, Istanbul, Bilgi University Press, pp. 39-56.

Sirman, Nükhet (2006) ‘Writing the Gender Regime of Republican Turkey’, in MacLean, Gerald (ed.) Writing Turkey: Explorations in Turkish History, Politics and Cultural Identity, London, Middlesex University Press, pp. 25-40.

Taylor, Charles (1994) ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Gutman, Amy (ed.) Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, Princeton, Princeton University Press, pp. 25-73.

Turner, Victor (1977) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press.

AUTHOR

NÜKHET SIRMAN

Professor, Boğaziçi University

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Honor, Reputation, and Reciprocity

Leslie Peirce

1 Honor in its usage today, in English at least, is typically defined by its constituent attributes: Dicitonary.com defines it as “honesty, fairness, or integrity in one’s beliefs and actions”. Reputation on the other hand is a relational concept: “the estimation in which a person or thing is held, especially by the community or the public generally”. It takes the community to bestow or deny good reputation.

2 Explicit terms for honor do not often occur in Ottoman sources from the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth century, the period I am interested in. When they do appear, it is the familiar terms `ırz and namus. 1 It seems somewhat risky, therefore, to use the word “honor” in talking about sensibilities and motivations in this period, at least without working from the ground up to observe how honor was conceived and deployed. On the other hand, reputation was palpably present, if not so labeled, in the talk and action of Ottoman subjects—as was the effort to maintain it, or to damage that of another person. To put this another way, looking at reputation and how one gained a good or bad one is arguably the most productive avenue for understanding how people in early modern Ottoman times understood honor. 3 This essay nevertheless employs the terms “honor” and “dishonor”. The reader should be thinking of them, however, as embedded in a relational process where one person’s gain may spell another’s loss, or there may be an attempt to maintain equilibrium among individuals, that is, to recoup damaged reputations for all parties involved in a troubled situation. A person who has been dishonored by the action of another may or may not suffer diminished reputation, depending upon how he or she reacts to the insult. Studying honor as a relational phenomenon—the process of censuring or validating a person or group’s actions or inactions—allows us to appreciate the capacity of Ottoman subjects to talk to each other about honor, and also, importantly, of Ottoman authorities and subjects to employ the language of honor to communicate about broader problems.

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The vocabulary and rhetoric of honor

4 Ordinary individuals thought and spoke about honor and dishonor in a variety of verbal registers. Let us examine some texts that suggest some of the ways they did so and some of the situations that propelled them to speak. The first set of examples is drawn from the court records of Aintab (today’s Gaziantep) for the years 1540-1541 and of Harput (Elazığ) for 1630-1631. Ottoman courts acted as not only as judicial forums in which Islamic Sharia and Ottoman sultanic law (kanun) were enforced but also as resources for members of the community, who regularly used their local court to air personal problems or disputes on their own initiative.

5 When the little daughter of Muhsin threw stones at the house of Haci Mansur, both residents of the provincial capital of Aintab, Mansur responded by attacking Muhsin both physically and verbally. He grabbed Muhsin’s beard and yelled, “Aren’t you a man? Why do you bother wearing a turban? Discipline your daughter!”2 Mansur had invaded two bodily zones of male honor, the beard and the head covering. Muhsin found the insult unacceptable, it seems, since he took the trouble of having Mansur’s words and deed recorded at court (it took two efforts to induce Mansur to make the complete statement above). In the end, each man made his point in a public manner. 6 Because what people said to and of one another could be actionable, court registers of this period are replete with the direct quotation of litigants’ speech. Testimony was almost always recorded in the Turkish past tense employed for eye or ear witness—dedi, “he said (and I know because I was there)”—rather than in the past tense that implied second-hand knowledge—demiş, “he said (or that is what I am given to understand)”. Litigants of course might mumble or verbally stumble in court, requiring judges and scribes to rephrase less than articulate speech. But in cases like that of Mansur, where what was said might have legal consequences, they strove when recording direct speech to remain as faithful as possible to the diction and word choice of the speaker. They needed to get it right, as there was always the possibility that a court record might be revisited for evidence in a future dispute. 7 The next case preserves the words of the most assertive young woman ever to emerge in the court registers I have read. The daughter of one Haci Mustafa, Fatma was a resident of the eastern Anatolian city of Harput. The crux of the case is her engagement to a certain Mevlut. He has given her the required dower or part of it at least. But six years have passed and no marriage has taken place. Moreover, Mevlut has married someone else. What brings it all to a head in 1631 is unclear, although what is clear is the discord between Fatma and her father. Apparently he has confined her to the house, though whether he has physically tied her down is unclear (her reference below to her immobility may be metaphorical). In the courtyard of the dwelling, she has, in her father’s words, been “moaning and crying out” (feryad u efgan) over her unwillingness to marry Mevlut. 8 As a consequence of her confinement, representatives of the court come to Fatma. They take her testimony as she speaks from the threshold of her house. This is what she says to them, or at least that part of her statement that the judge considered necessary to record: My father has tied me to the courtyard by my skirt. I am my own agent [başıma vekilim], and I will not marry Mevlut. I take comfort from my clan and my relatives, and I appoint Mehmed my agent in this matter [of marriage]. Whomever I consent

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to marry, let that person make a contract of marriage for me. This Mevlut gave me a linen cap and a box, and not much more.3 9 It is hard to know how old Fatma is, but given the long engagement, she could be twenty or so—that is, an unmarried yet adult female, at risk of not being able to find another suitor, especially one she would find satisfactory. In other words, if Fatma’s (dis)honor is at stake in this incident, it is the undesirable alternative between the socially isolating status of the spinster and settling for being a junior wife. Out of anger, worry, desperation or all of these, Fatma takes the daring step of asserting her legal autonomy. She also makes it clear what she thinks of Mevlut’s paltry gifts.

10 Fatma’s is an audacious break with a father’s authority. To be sure, her refusal of Mevlut is legally permissible on the principle that a virgin who has reached majority (either signs of full puberty or the age of seventeen) can reject the fiancé chosen by her elders.4 Local knowledge of the law was widespread, and it was not uncommon for young women to use their court to object to matches made by fathers or other male relatives (see, for example, cases in Ongan 1974). But what is highly unusual in records of these centuries is Fatma’s open and total rejection of her father’s authority over her as her guardian under the law. Moreover, Haci Mustafa’s restraint of his daughter appears to have backfired, for her cries of abuse have presumably put the whole family’s reputation in jeopardy. 11 Fatma may not have been alone in her complaints, for a sympathetic member of the household has apparently enabled her to communicate with her chosen proxy Mehmed. Could it be her mother? What she thought about her husband’s actions or her daughter’s willfulness or what her own stake might be in the troublesome situation is unknown—perhaps she sympathized with her daughter, or even supported her resistance. Indeed, the will of mothers is rarely evident in these records. Except in the case of orphans (children who had lost their father), a mother’s guardianship of her children was increasingly discouraged by the Ottoman regime. The famed jurist Ebu Suud, working in the mid-sixteenth-century, ruled in his fatwas that marriage of a female by a guardian other than her father or grandfather had to be sanctioned by the local judge (Düzdăg 1983: 37-38). This was only one piece of legislation in the program to tighten up on marriage and sexual morality, a phenomenon that appears to have been near universal in this period (see, for example, Crawford 2007). In turn, honor and reputation (as well as the ability to resist the state’s norms) adjusted to the shifts (Peirce 2010). 12 The last in our set of examples from court records concerns a slander case brought by Esma, daughter of Hoca Hamza, against her brother Hamza. Hamza had apparently cursed at his sister. “He slandered me by calling me a whore”, Esma alleged before the judge of Aintab.5 Hamza’s curse was actionable as an instance of false accusation of adultery. Curses hurled at others were often sexual in nature (calling someone a pimp/ whore/sodomite/fornicator and so on). Should the target of the curse take action to defend his or her reputation, as Esma did, a potentially heavy penalty awaited the slanderer. This does not seem to have stopped people from loose talk, for cursing by both genders appears to have been a common social habit, at least in parts of early modern Anatolia. One reason for its ubiquity was that cursing and slander were a weapon of the weak, a way to get one’s voice heard publicly. Sometimes, however, curses were simply spoken in the heat of anger or frustration, as Hamza’s words appear to have been.

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13 Esma lost her case. The court noted that she “was unable to supply the requisite number of witnesses” to Hamza’s utterance, and he cleared himself with an oath. Unlike Fatma’s case, where unknown complexities may lurk behind the pages of the Harput register, the Aintab register provide clues to family tension among the children of Hoca Hamza. Two weeks after her suit against her brother, Esma would come to court to use the hefty sum of money she inherited from her deceased father to purchase her brother Abdulkadir’s share in the house that had been left to him and Hamza.6 14 Perhaps it was his sister’s plan to acquire part of the family dwelling that caused Hamza to curse her. Esma was going against the Aintab norm of sisters yielding the inherited family dwelling to brothers. Moreover, immediately after acquiring her share of the house, the litigious Esma took her female neighbor to court to demand structural alterations in the latter’s house so as to protect her own domestic privacy. Esma, it seems, was a woman intent on taking care of herself and a legally savvy and active user of the court. All the more likely, then, that her case against Hamza was taken with full awareness of the price she might pay to make his slander public. Reputation could be worth more than money, and Esma apparently had the resources to afford it. 15 Only in the last of these three court cases has the judge’s task been to adjudicate a lawsuit. In the other two, the court and its personnel have recorded voices in dispute. Whether the court’s intervention was invited by the disputants or necessitated in the interest of communal order (we cannot be sure), it has apparently helped to restore some equilibrium among neighbors or families attacking each other’s integrity. When we turn to narrative mediums, however, it soon becomes evident that authors who engaged problems of honor and reputation could more easily endow them with tendentious or moralizing rhetoric than could the documentary medium of the court record. 16 The two incidents narrated below turn on the public dishonor of an entire community. One is drawn from the history of the seventeenth-century author and government servant Ibrahim Peçevi. The second is from the Register of Important Affairs (Mühimme Defteri), in which the sultan’s Imperial Council recorded petitions from across the empire and its responses to them. Both texts are indirect critiques of the weak or incompetent government that prevailed during the 1620s and the early 1630s (Fatma’s Harput was also experiencing disorder at the time). Both employ stories of the dishonoring of women to make the point about the sultanate’s inability to protect the honor of its subjects. 17 Peçevi related a story that took place in Tokat, winter headquarters of the Ottoman army during its eastern campaigns. The sorry tale, which he heard first hand, concerned the daughter of a poor peasant. The father had been forced to sell her to the village grandee in order to pay off debts incurred by the financial burdens imposed by the latter. The grandee then proceeded to auction the girl off in the streets of Tokat. Peçevi deplored the fact that this could happen at a time when the grand vizier, the Janissary commander, and the commanders of the imperial cavalry troops were all resident in Tokat. “Things had come to such a pass,” commented the historian, “that even with so many great men in the city supposedly keeping order, not a one prevented this or was capable even of speaking out against it.”7 Cities were thought to be entities with character, and any reputation Tokat may have had as a place where the sultan’s justice prevailed was tarnished.

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18 The incident narrated in the Imperial Council’s Register echoed Peçevi’s implication that delegates of the sultan’s authority were powerless because he was powerless—or, just as bad, negligent. As a consequence, local communities lacked resources to preserve the good reputation of their citizens. The first victim to be dishonored in this incident, which took place in 1630 in Göynük, a town near Bursa, was Emine, the wife of a judge, Mevlana Mustafa. The second was the judge himself. What had happened was that Mevlana Mustafa called in a loan of 50,000 silver coins from a certain Hüseyin. The latter responded by abducting Emine. He then handed her over to one of his followers “to use” (for sex). 19 The incident was relayed to the Imperial Council in Istanbul in a petition authored by the head judge of Göynük, Mevlana Abdulaziz. His purpose was to appeal to the government to send forces against the man he described as a bandit captain of a gang of forty. This was not a case of litigation where a judge had to remain neutral, but rather a complaint whose rhetoric was carefully crafted to chide the sultan’s viziers, if implicitly, for the disorder then rampant in parts of Anatolia. Mevlana Abdulaziz pointedly noted that “not one of the leading men of the province was capable of rescuing her”.8 The dishonor of Emine, the judge Mevlana Mustafa, and the hapless dignitaries of the province, like that of the Tokat protagonists, was the dishonor of the state. The sultanate had failed its subjects by its inability to uphold the unwritten constitution of the empire—royal protection in exchange for loyal allegiance. It was a dismal commentary on the times, for the essential contract of empire appeared to be broken.

Reciprocity and the social contract

20 I would like to borrow from the vocabulary of European thought to approach the question of reciprocity and the goal of equilibrium in the quest for honor and reputation. The idea to consider honor as a social contract was suggested by an NYU graduate student who linked the two phenomena in a paper responding to a set of readings on the theme “honor and the state”; it seemed a productive idea to think with. 9 The term “social contract” of course has a long history in European thought. It is not my purpose to impose the term on Ottoman dynamics but rather to use it as an entrée into thinking about the contractual habits of early modern Ottoman communities.

21 The many Ottoman intellectuals interested in law and government would have found much to recognize in Hugo Grotius’ De Jure Belli ac Pacis (On the law/rights of war and peace), or at least in its prolegomena. Here, the profoundly influential Dutch thinker lays out the foundation of his case for international law. I cite from this particular work because it appeared in the period considered here (1625), in advance of Enlightenment thinking, and because Grotius recognizes the power of “custom and tacit compact”, so integral to the mentality of the subjects of the Ottoman empire. “The mother of right— that is of natural law [jus]—is human nature;” he says, “for this would lead us to desire mutual society, even if it were not required for the supply of other wants. And the mother of civil laws is obligation by mutual compact.” Like the Ottomans, Grotius does not leave all up to humankind. He is concerned to reconcile natural law with “sacred history”: it is God who authors jus in humans (Hugo Grotius 1902). 22 Contractual practices were embedded in the socio-legal culture of the early modern Ottoman world. In addition to the expected—property sale, purchase, rental and loan

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contracts—were engagement and marriage (among Muslims not a sacrament but a formal contract), and one might add divorce, with its entailment of agreements regarding financial support and custody. In theory at least, the ideal of just exchange imbued contracts with more than an instrumental function. All contracts had witnesses, who, if necessary in the future, could supply the testimony that Islamic law regarded as the bedrock of the legal process. 23 Trust in mediation was implicit in the Ottoman social contract. The widespread practice of sulh—settling disputes by the arbitration of neutral parties—could involve up to four parties to achieve the compact of reconciliation: the two disputant parties, the arbiters, and the judge, who oversaw and sanctioned the final agreement. In the court records I have studied, sulh cases are the sole locus of overt religious reference: they were sometimes recorded along with the hadith “el-sulh hayırdır” (“peacemaking is a benefaction”). Perhaps the hadith enshrined the Prophet Muhammad’s original communal function as an arbiter (hakim). Respect for sulh was further enshrined in the custom of calling arbiters musalihun, “peace-makers”, or “Muslims”, meaning morally upright men.10 24 “Contractualism” may not fit all habits that bound people together in this period, willingly or not. “Mutualities” may be a better way to think about some. The term hak— one’s share, right, or due justice—was not uncommonly asserted at the courts of judges, suggesting that individuals expected, ideally, to be treated fairly, by others, by the law, and by the state. Another common practice that drew people into a bonded relationship was kefalet, mutual guarantorship—that is, the act of appointing or acting as guarantor or surety for another’s whereabouts, debts, or crimes. The practice of kefalet has been attested for early modern Bulgarian towns, Istanbul, and Jerusalem (Ivanova 1990; Abou-El-Haj 201311). 25 Here is the record of the kefalet formed by six Armenian men of Aintab before the judge. They acted on behalf of the whole Armenian population of the city as well as Armenians in the general region: If any harm or damage is done by any Armenian from our district, we collectively assume responsibility for it. And we assume responsibility for those [Armenians] who come among us, those from outside. Henceforth if anything contrary is done by any of our community, hold [the six of] us accountable.12 26 The specific impetus for this oath of unity was probably an investigation one week earlier by the local governor’s men into a crime allegedly committed within the Armenian community five years earlier (the murder of a convert to Islam whose corpse had just been exposed). It was time to unite defensively.

27 If hak could be an adversarial reciprocity, a claim to one’s own due, kefalet was a consolidating reciprocity. The pledge of mutual support was a resource often called upon in circumstances of threat or insecurity. Within the space of one week in June 1541 in the city of Aintab, the butchers, the bakers, and eight military pensioners came before the judge to register mutual guarantorships.13 For each group, the judge recorded the names of its members and stated that they were now “guarantors and responsible parties for one another”; for the butchers, he added, “in good times and bad”. The impetus for this spate of protective initiatives was the departure of a special agent sent from Istanbul to investigate market practices in Aintab. He had spent most of his month in the city arraigning several prominent men who were forced to pay back taxes due to the state. Ordinary individuals who lacked the financial wherewithal that

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the errant city leaders could draw on—butchers, bakers, and retirees, for instance— protected themselves and their business reputations in mutual compact. 28 The dynamics of contractualism and mutuality can be attributed to the hundreds of Ottoman courts operating in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Courts existed ostensibly for the purpose of implementing the law, that is, educating and inducing the subject population to conform to the legal regime of the Ottoman state. But they also served as a notarial bank. People regularly used the judge’s office as a repository for statements they wanted to have registered, either to publicize things said and/or done to them or to preserve information for possible retrieval as evidence in the future. (The technical term for this practice was “anticipation of consequences”.14) Muhsin may have had both purposes in mind when he induced Mansur to repeat what he had said and done in response to the stoning of his house. 29 The implicit contract between the court and its users comprised the services provided by the court for the public in exchange for the patronage of the court by the public as a venue for dispute resolution. It took inducement to make habitual users of the state’s legal system out of people who before the Pax Ottomanica may have lacked a responsible court or indeed any court at all. A relevant Ottoman reform of the court system was to establish designated courthouses (often, as in Aintab, the residence of the judge), replacing the use of mosque courtyards, for example, where women and non-Muslims may have been reluctant—or even unable—to enter. Each of the three court cases cited above was, in some degree, an example of the judge’s court not as a prosecutorial authority but as a resource for sorting out individuals in conflict or trouble. 30 All this is not to imply that the Ottoman empire was a self-regulating society or that the solutions to all problems were negotiated. Force and the sword of justice were liberally applied by the authorities (including self-appointed authorities such as tribal lords and the rebel pashas of the seventeenth century). But the pax Ottomanica was a recent experience for many communities whose history had more often been one of political decentralization and contested sovereignty than of sustained rule by a competent and effective sovereign power. Roy Mottahedeh has eloquently pointed out that some such communities yearned not to be free but to be ruled, especially the nobles and elders among them (Mottahedeh 1980: 175-6). In the sometimes long interstices between imperial overlordship, communities were left to their own devices, requiring them to devise mechanisms for self-regulation. Aintab and Harput were places with such a history. 31 Mottahedeh gives the example of Damascus in the late 10th century as a city in search of a ruler. The Fatimid governor had fled in the face of Buyid advance, and the ahdath, gangs of young men, had taken control of the city. The episode is eerily reminiscent of militias who have recently done the same in Syrian cities that have fallen bereft of any rational administration (Barnard 2013). My point here is that it did not take the Ottoman sultanate to introduce the mechanisms for regulating reputation and personal integrity discussed in this and the next section. The pax Ottomanica, with its power to enforce decisions and look out for those especially at risk, could of course enable such mechanisms to work more effectively. But in places like Tokat and Göynük in moments like the “time of troubles” of the 1620s and 30s, even the state’s officials could prove powerless.

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Finding equilibrium

32 Let us turn now to an incident that casts light on a community’s efforts to avoid a rupture over damaged reputations. This case, from the court record of Aintab of 1540-1541, revolves around a situation in which two parties in opposition both suffer personal dishonor.15 It illustrates several dynamics relating to reputation and how it is constituted—among individuals, between the individual and the community, between the community and the authorities (here, the government-appointed judge and his court).

33 To our eyes, one party—the father-in-law, Mehmed, who has allegedly raped his young son’s bride—may look suspiciously guilty. The other party—the child bride Ineh, whose marriage has not yet been consummated—appears to be an innocent victim. But the court, or rather the mechanisms of the local socio-legal culture, approach the case as one of double reputations at risk—his because Ineh publicly accuses him of rape, hers because it is now public knowledge, by her own admission, that she has been sexually defiled. The outcome of this case is an example of reputational equilibrium—in other words, the community and the court intervene to salvage some semblance of honor for all involved. Put another way, the goal is to limit damage to both parties’ standing in the community. Neither Mehmed nor Ineh is the clear winner or loser in this affair. 34 How does equilibrium come about? There is no proof, no eye witness to the rape; Ineh’s accusation is all that there is. To test the validity of her allegation, that is, the likelihood that Mehmed, who denies the rape before the judge, could have done such a thing, the court holds an official investigation into his reputation among the community. Their consensus is entered into the court record: “When the people of the village were questioned [about Mehmed], they said: ‘Mehmed has been together with us from the time we were all children. We have never observed or heard of any wrongdoing on his part. We consider his people as friends’.” They know him well, he is not a bad man, and his whole family are worthy of friendship. Here is a village’s measure of reputation, in which the integrity of both the individual and the family count.16 35 It may seem that Ineh has lost. But reputation is a tricky business in Aintab. It appears to have been a basic assumption in Ottoman socio-legal culture that reputation was vital social insurance even for the most obscure person in the community, a little peasant girl in a remote village. Ineh’s family is also at risk of dishonor, and it is perhaps they who have propelled their daughter to the province’s only court (Ineh’s step-father in fact is called upon during the exchange of testimony). Why the judge has allowed Ineh’s testimony to be heard—he had the authority to refuse to hear a case—is presumably his recognition that damaged reputations in conflict are not good for the future tranquility of the community. The disposition of social equity, arguably the core tenet of Ottoman rhetoric on just rule, acknowledged that the most powerless of individuals was embedded a network of relationships that could permeate the local geography, and therefore disturb it. 36 Now for the tricky business. Ineh’s accusation may not get Mehmed judged guilty, but at the same time it does not bode well for him in the long run. As we have seen, people of the time were charged with archiving memory of an individual’s personal conduct. Being there, observing, noting, and remembering was apparently an ingrained habit. Mehmed has now acquired a töhmet, a latent blot on his reputation. If he is accused or

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suspected again, the community will cite this incident, no longer latent, and testify that “once he was accused of rape”. Going into the court hearing, Mehmed was presumably töhmetsiz, unblemished in reputation, but now he is töhmetli, a man whose morals may become suspect in the future. 37 Testimony like that of the villagers regarding Mehmed’s good reputation is not infrequent in the court records. At least in the Aintab region, there appears to be regular reliance on the character record of an individual kept by neighbors and acquaintances. It is more like a pre-criminal record than the criminal record we are familiar with today. In Aintab, surveillance is not merely a universal habit, it seems, but a quasi-legal responsibility. Here are two examples of “töhmet-ing” at work: • When Canpaşa, a married peasant woman, accuses Hamza of breaking into her house at night, climbing into her bed, and assaulting her, Hamza denies the accusation. Investigation among the people of the village shows that he has been similarly accused with regard to another woman in the village and therefore has a töhmet. Hamza is sentenced to punishment by the judge.17 • Mezid brings a case against Hüsniye, wife of Şeyhi, saying that when he was staying at their house, Hüsniye came to him in bed after Şeyhi had fallen asleep. Hüsniye’s character is investigated, and three men of the city neighborhood testify that “we have never known any ill conduct on her part, and we cannot say she is prone to bad behavior.”18 (Note that a woman could be guilty of sexual aggression. Note also that Mezid is now guilty of slander, defined as unsubstantiated accusation of sexual misconduct.)

38 The töhmet system, if we can call it that, was most likely a popular response to the strict evidentiary rules of Sharia. As scholars commonly recognize, sexual crime (zina)— adultery, fornication, rape, and sodomy—was hard to prosecute because of the Sharia requirement of four witnesses who had been close-up observers of the deed. Governments and communities, however, found ways to compensate for the strictness of Sharia. Ottoman practice tolerated hearsay evidence of adultery and rape, at least in this period. Slander was another means of airing a sexual offence. People used slander as a compensatory weapon of censure, for they were hauled into court for making accusations that they clearly could not substantiate. When they did so, it was apparently because they could alter their target’s reputational standing and hopefully rehabilitate their own. Presumably, they found it worth risking the heavy penalty for slander (a fine and/or up to eighty strokes of the bastinado).

39 Losers could also win, in other words. One might have to break the law, but one might successfully assert one’s own moral innocence and rectitude by exposing one’s antagonist. The woman Hadice is an example. Hadice travelled from Aleppo to Aintab to accuse one Abdulkadir, scion of an Aintab merchant family, of entering her house in Aleppo at night and raping her. She was unable to provided witnesses, or at least she brought none with her on the journey to the Aintab court. Hadice lost her suit when Abdulkadir took an oath of innocence.19 40 Why make the trek only to lose the case and presumably pay a hefty fine for sexual slander? the answer: to accuse Abdulkadir in his own social environment. Hadice’s is another case involving double reputations at risk. She followed the same strategy as Ineh did: create a töhmet against the alleged rapist and repair one’s own honor by publicizing to kin, neighbors, community that one had resisted the illicit sexual act. Hadice could presumably purchase a copy of the case record from the Aintab court and have it inscribed in the register of her neighborhood court in Aleppo (the technical

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term was “transfer of testimony”). Perhaps predictably, women had to work harder to protect their honor, exposing sordid events to keep their reputations as intact as possible. Hadice of Aleppo may have been more successful than she suspected, for Abdulkadir, as it turns out, was the brother of Esma and Hamza. Siblings in an apparently quarrelsome family, they may already have acquired a dubious reputation in their community. 41 At least in the regions studied here, popular practice made reputation a measurable phenomenon. The töhmet system allowed local individuals to insert themselves into the process of adjudicating morals. It allowed females, more often victims than perpetrators of humiliating acts, to find a way to tell their side of the story, although recouping even a shred of their tarnished honor might come at a literal cost. For chronic abusers, on the other hand, it had the advantage of gradual criminalization: töhmet was an admonitory as well as a punitive pressure, somewhat akin to the “three strikes and you’re out” laws that began to proliferate in the U.S. in the 1990s.20 Without more work in the Ottoman court records and cognate sources, it is hard to say how many töhmets it took to get one convicted, or whether this mechanism was practiced across the empire.

Afterthought

42 In writing about Hadice and Ineh, I cannot help but be reminded of the allegation of rape in 1991 against William Kennedy Smith, nephew of John, Robert and Edward Kennedy. Smith was tried and acquitted on a charge of rape in a trial that was national news. Here are the facts, as relayed by Wikipedia: The incident began on the evening of Good Friday, March 29, 1991, when Smith, 30 years old, was in a bar in Palm Beach, Florida, with his uncle, Senator Ted Kennedy, and his cousin Patrick Kennedy. Smith met a 29-year-old woman, Patricia Bowman, and another young woman at the bar. The four21 then went to a nearby house owned by the Kennedy family. Smith and the 29-year-old Bowman walked along the beach. Bowman alleged that Smith raped her; Smith testified that the sex was consensual. Although three women were willing to testify that Smith had sexually assaulted them in incidents in the 1980s not reported to the police, their testimony was excluded. Smith was acquitted of all charges.22 43 A friend who was then an editor on the national desk at the Washington Post, points out that “this was a time when the media and the country were just starting to talk about political leaders' private lives.” Before the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair, she notes, the media generally ignored or repressed reporting that would damage the reputations of the powerful. The exception was when misconduct “was flaunted-- Wilbur Mills driving into the Tidal Basin, Gary Hart being photographed with [Donna Rice] in his lap aboard a boat named Monkey Business. Then it was the men whose honor was stained: the women were presumed to be prostitutes.”23

44 Thinking about Ineh, Hadice, and the three American women who had not spoken publicly about their alleged rape before the Smith trial prompts some questions. How many females in the early modern Ottoman empire kept silent about their violation, or were forced to keep silent? And how many females were punished by vigilante justice for their sullied state? The Imperial Statute Book (Kanunnameh-i Osmanî) issued by Suleyman I around 1540 admitted that government authorities were not able to suppress the custom of honor killing; it could only attempt to curtail the number of

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scenarios that it would tolerate (Heyd 1973: 59, 98). On the other side of the balance, something like the töhmet system might have enabled the three U.S. women to have their testimony count at the 1991 trial. 45 The William Kennedy Smith trial offers another lesson, namely, that a töhmet may stick merely as a result of the publicity potential of trials. The Ottoman introduction of courthouses probably enabled more and different kinds of spectators to watch trials and other court proceedings (and then go home and gossip about them). Readers of this essay might now remember the Smith trial, not only because its author remembers and has cited it here, but also because websites like Wikipedia rake up detritus from the past, enabling old stories to become fresh fodder for moralizing commentary. On other hand, the recent career of Bill Clinton has been noteworthy for its exculpatory public service and appears to have largely rehabilitated his reputation. We can only speculate whether their blemished reputations dogged Ineh, Mehmed, and others after their court appearances or whether scrupulous post-trial conduct helped to restore their honor.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abou-El-Haj, Rifa‘at A. (2013) ‘A Probe into the Social: Ottoman Jerusalem in the Sixteenth Century’, Journal of Turkish Studies 39: Defterology – Festschrift in Honor of Heath Lowry I, pp. 83-93.

Barnard, Anne (2013) ‘Syria Military Shows Strain in a War It Wasn’t Built to Fight’, New York Times, March 12, 2013.

Crawford, Katherine (2007) European Sexualities, 1400-1800, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Düzdağ, Mehmet Ertuğrul (1983) Şeyhülislâm Ebussuud Efendi Fetvaları Işığında 16. Asır Türk Hayatı, Istanbul, Enderun Kitabevi.

Hallaq, Wael (1998) ‘The qadi’s divan (sijill) before the Ottomans’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 61, pp. 416-436.

Heyd, Uriel (Ménage, Victor Louis, ed.) (1973) Studies in Old Ottoman Criminal Law, Oxford, Clarendon Press.

Hugo Grotius (1902) The Rights of War and Peace, Boston, 1902, V:1-24, URL: http:// catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/010430054.

Ivanova, Svetlana (1990) ‘Institute of Collective Duty in the Bulgarian Towns of the XV-XVIII Centuries’, Исторически преглед 46 (1), pp. 33-44.

Meninski, Franciszek (1680) Thesaurus linguarum orientalium turcicae, arabicae, persicae, 6 vol., Vienna.

Mottahedeh, Roy P. (1980) Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press.

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Ongan, Halit (1974) Ankara’nın İki Numaralı Şer’iye Sicili, 1 Muharrem 997 – 8 Ramazan 998 (20 Kasım 1588-11 Temmuz 1590), Ankara, Türk Tarih Kurumu.

Peirce, Leslie (2003a) Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab, Berkeley, University of California Press.

Peirce, Leslie (2003b) ‘İne’s Story: A Child Marriage in Trouble’, in Peirce, Leslie, Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab, Berkeley, University of California Press.

Peirce, Leslie (2010) ‘Domesticating Sexuality: Harem Culture in Ottoman Imperial Law’, in Booth, Marilyn (ed.), Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces, Durham, Duke University Press, pp. 104-135.

White, James Boyd (1985) Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of the Law, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press.

‘William Kennedy Smith’, Wikipedia, URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kennedy_Smith (as of June 6, 2014).

NOTES

1. Late 17th-century definitions in several vernacular languages as well as Latin are found in Meninski 1680: ‘ırz: reputazione, honore, fama, stima (Italian); réputation, honneur, renommée, estime (French); Ruhm, Ehr, Nam (German); in reference to women, ‘ırz connotes chastity in Turkish; nâmûs: reputazione, honore, fama, dignità, legge & vergogna (Italian); réputation, honneur, renommée, dignité, & honte (French); Ehr, Ruhm, Nam (German). 2. Gaziantep Şeriyye Sicili 2: 132b, c. The Gaziantep and Harput court records (şeriyye sicilleri) are housed in the Milli Kütüphane (National Library) in Ankara. I thank the Islam Araştırma Merkezi (Center for Research on Islam) in Istanbul for making a Xerox copy of the Harput court records available to me. 3. Harput Şeriyye Sicili 181: 4a, b. I thank Hasan Karataş for his help in deciphering this record. 4. In Hanafi jurisprudence, males and females were traditionally considered to arrive at legal majority (buluğ) when signs of physical maturation were observable; in their absence, buluğ was the age of fifteen. However, in some 16th-century Ottoman interpretations of Sharia, the age of maturity was deemed seventeen for females and eighteen for males (for Ebu Suud’s view, see Düzdağ 1983: 33). 5. Gaziantep Şeriyye Sicili 2: 74b. 6. Ibid., 2: 138b. 7. Ibrahim Peçevi, Tarih-i Peçevi, (Istanbul, 1281-1284/1864-67), 2:402. 8. 85 Numaralı Mühimme Defteri (1040-1041/1630-1631) [Register of Important Affairs No. 85, 1630-1631] (Ankara, 2002), Order #381c (3 June 1631), pp. 232-233. 9. I am grateful to Laura Garland for permitting me to adopt her use of social contract. 10. Sulh is discussed further in Chapter 5 of my Morality Tales (2003); kefalet, below, is discussed in Chapter 7. 11. I thank Rifa‘at Abou-El-Hajj for allowing me to cite his essay. 12. Gaziantep Şeriyye Sicili 161: 173a (“bizim mahallemizden Arameniyâ taifesinden zarar ve ziyan olursa külliyen kefil olduk diyüb ve bizim aramız[a] gelüb hariçden gelenlere dahi kefil olduk. Ba‘d el-yevm aramızdan bir muhalef iş olursa, bizden bilin...”). 13. Gaziantep Şeriyye Sicili 2: 50b, 55a, 59c. 14. See Hallaq 1998: 424-425, on the importance of “anticipation of consequences” as a raison d’être for keeping judicial records.

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15. This episode is discussed at greater length in Peirce 2003b. 16. Note that the villagers do not say we “know” of no harm, but rather employ verbs of primary (sight) and secondary (hearsay} knowledge, echoing the two past tenses in Turkish. 17. Gaziantep Şeriyye Sicili 161: 28a. 18. Ibid.: 164a. 19. Gaziantep Şeriyye Sicili 2: 231b. 20. On the purposes of criminal law, see White 1985: 192-203. 21. Apparently excluding Senator Kennedy. 22. ‘William Kennedy Smith’ (as of June 6, 2014). I have made minor edits in the Wikipedia text. 23. Personal communication from Joanne Omang, March 14, 2013.

ABSTRACTS

The essay argues that looking at reputation and how one gained a good or bad one is the most productive avenue for understanding how people in early modern Ottoman times understood honor. It explores honor and dishonor as relational processes whereby one person’s gain may spell another’s loss, or there may be an attempt to maintain equilibrium among individuals, that is, to recoup damaged reputations for all parties involved in a troubled situation. The role of individuals acting as mediators, witnesses, and guarantors are explored for the ways in which the community figured in the making or breaking of reputation. Sources drawn upon for the essay consist primarily of court cases but also include historical writings and petitions submitted to the sultanate.

INDEX

Keywords: honor, dishonor, reputation, reciprocity, mediation

AUTHOR

LESLIE PEIRCE

History Department, New York University

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Gendered Subjects in Ottoman Constitutional Agreements, ca. 1740-1860

Başak Tuğ

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This paper is part of a larger project which aims to trace continuities and changes in governmental and punitive techniques of the Ottoman power over moral order from the mid-eighteenth century to the early decades of the Tanzimat era. The larger project aims to analyze the legal culture of the Tanzimat through both norms (imperial decrees, criminal codes, etc.) and practices (litigations in the courts and higher councils). As a beginning to this larger project, the current paper makes only a discursive analysis of the Tanzimat Edict and the Criminal Codes of the period.

Introduction

1 There is no doubt that human dignity occupies a fundamental place in international human rights as well as in constitutional democracies of the world. The Preamble of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of the 1948 starts as, “all men are born free and equal, in dignity and in rights.” The very first article of the German constitution declares human dignity as inviolable and entrusts all the state authorities with protecting it.1 Most of the constitutional courts protect basic rights such as right to life, property, privacy, freedom of speech and reproduction in various ways through rationalizing this normative concept of human dignity despite the fact that interpretations vary.2

2 Although the modern Turkish Constitution of 1982 which is the current constitution in the Turkish Republic does not use the term human dignity, this normative term is

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replaced by another one: “honor” (i.e., onur).3 The preamble of the Turkish Constitution clearly states: “Every Turkish citizen has an innate right and power to lead an honorable life and to improve his/her material and spiritual well-being under the aegis of national culture, civilization, and the rule of law through the exercise of fundamental rights and freedoms set forth in this constitution in conformity with the requirements of equality and social justice.”4 Living an honorable5 life and improving material and spiritual well-being through exercising fundamental rights and freedoms is what human dignity means in the Turkish constitution. Why are dignity and honor always pronounced together with justice in constitutional agreements between the state and its citizens? 3 The association of honor with justice was in fact codified well over a hundred years earlier by the Tanzimat Edict of 1839 in the Ottoman Empire. This proto-constitution guaranteed protection of “life, honor and property” to the Ottoman subjects. Yet, such a proto-constitutional relationship between the subjects and the state actually started much earlier, at least in legal correspondence between the Ottoman subjects and the central government in the eighteenth century. This paper aims to historicize the notion of honor in Ottoman legal discourse and practice from the early-modern period to the so-called “reform era,” the era most scholars maintain began with the Tanzimat Edict of 1839. Such a historical approach uses justice as a key to understand honor not as a value system but as a rhetoric. By doing this, it also challenges the conceptualization of honor as a value system or a structure upon which a monolithic Mediterranean culture has been constructed. Thus, it problematizes an a-historical conception of honor which takes for granted that honor codes in modern societies are largely the legacy of “traditional” norms of pre-modern periods.

4 This study argues that the recurring presence of honor in the correspondence especially between the central government and the Ottoman subjects in the eighteenth century reflects the development of new parameters between the state and its subjects in moral terms. Although the idea of the “circle of justice” (daire-yi adliyye) already conceptualized a reciprocal relationship between the government and subjects on the basis of legitimacy and justice, a persistent emphasis on honor—with regard to sexual violence but not necessarily restricted to it—in the legal terminology of both the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries points to a new moral discourse that emerges during this period. The Ottoman central government’s claim to protect the honor of its subjects in the eighteenth century reflects a dialogic process in which subjects started to use new types of legal terminology and concepts to elicit the intervention of state in local matters that threatened their well-being. On the one hand, the motto of “life, honor and property” featured in the Tanzimat Edict represents a continuation of the discourse of honor as a legitimizing mechanism. Yet, on the other hand, the legal codification of honor in the Criminal Codes of the nineteenth century reflects a novel constitutional construction of gendered citizenship around reproduction in the conjugal family through the partnership of the patriarchal state and male subjects. 5 To discuss the historical development of this relatively novel relationship, the paper first explores the theories of the “circle of justice” in conjunction with the politico- administrative jurisdiction of the sovereign in Islamic and Ottoman political thought and practice. Secondly, it traces the utilization of the term “violation of honor” (hetk-i ‘ırz) in eighteenth-century Ottoman legal practice and discourse and explores the pivotal role of sexuality in the perception of honor and violence. Furthermore, it

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analyzes the discourse of the “protection of honor” as a legitimizing motive behind the interventions of the political power in the sexual sphere. Finally, it contemplates the motto of “life, honor and property” of the Tanzimat Edict as well as the codification of the concept of “violation of honor” in the Criminal Law of the nineteenth century to investigate the continuities with as well as ruptures from earlier notions of honor. One should note here that the analysis of the Tanzimat legal reforms of the nineteenth century are confined only to the discursive analysis of texts, whereas, the eighteenth- century legal culture has been analyzed through both legal discourse and practices. This paper aims to show that the novelty of the discourse of honor in the nineteenth century was its disposition towards the family as the locus of “protecting life” through reproduction.

“Circle of Justice” in Early-Modern Ottoman Legal Theory

6 The political prerogative of the Ottoman state over the “social” space of its subjects and the close moral association of justice and honor have their roots in the pre-Ottoman past. In the patrimonial structure of the Ottoman political system, the idea of the “circle of justice”6 conceptualized justice as being directly disseminated by the sovereign as the trustee of the prosperity of its subjects. Furthermore, the principle of siyasa shar‘iyya in Islamic law, especially in the Hanafi doctrine of law that the Ottomans officially adopted, provided grounds for the political prerogative of the sovereign, and the government on his behalf, to preside over public order.

7 The close relationship between the idea of the wise and moral ruler and the well-being and honor of his subjects upon which the Ottoman idea of justice was constructed has its roots in a universal perennial repertoire. Inspired by Greek political wisdom literature and themes from the writings of apparently Sasanian origin, Arabic political writing in the Umayyad and Abbasid periods was established upon some aggregative common topics of power among which are the axial position of power (sultan) in the organization of social order and “the direct impact of his virtues and vices upon the moral tenor of his subjects” (Al-Azmeh 2001: 83-95). The “mirror for princes” or “advice for kings” genres written by the courtiers such as Nizam al-Mülk (1018-1092) and by prominent ulama luminaries like al-Ghazali (1058-1111) and al-Mawardi (972-1058) used a political repertoire of hierarchy emphasizing the primacy of king over society denoting self-mastery as prerequisite for the proper exercise of power and ethical preconditions of just rulership deriving from Aristotelian ethics and material of Greek origin (ibid.: 94-8). 8 Yet, what the works of advice for kings written by the Arabic ulama did was rename and recast “the perennial political wisdom attributed to Persians, Greeks or others” as “prophetic or Koranic” and insert “in a distinctive genealogy that is specifically Muslim” (ibid.: 99). This is how, according to Aziz ʻAzmah,̣ the Muslim character of public institutions was brought about. The development of the genre of shar’ist politics (siyasa shar‘iyya) which set the discursive rules of the legal arrangements of government was also based on the amalgamation of the paradigm of political writings with absolutist claims and of Muslim jurisprudence with prescriptive exemplary models (ibid.: 100). Hence, the idea that the ruler represents an exemplary moral model

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for his subjects and therefore determines the moral order of the society he rules is a very ancient one upon which early Ottoman political thought was established. 9 First, the Ottomans appropriated and transformed many of these ideas into a local model according to changing political and social needs throughout the long history of the Empire. In early Ottoman political writings such as the Ahmedî’s (c 1334/1335-1412) Iskendernâme and Tursun Beğ’s (after 1426-after 1488) Târîh-i Ebü’l-Feth (History of the Conqueror), the ethical discourse on the kingly virtues emphasized in earlier literature was adopted, for example, in explaining the close connection between the ruler’s moral virtues like his honor or honesty (‘iffet) and justice (‘adâlet) (Sariyannis 2011: 122-26). In Kanûn-i Şehinşâhî (Imperial Laws), Bitlisî (ca. 1450-1520) defines four cardinal virtues (honesty/chastity, courage, wisdom and justice) among which justice represents the combination of the other three. Furthermore, affection and fairness towards his subjects [“the same way he expects his subjects to fulfill their own obligations”] are intrinsic to his definition of justice.7 One should note that the relationship between the king and his subjects is defined here in a mutual terms. 10 These exemplary models turned into a more abstract model of governance with the idea of the “circle of justice” from the late sixteenth century onwards, especially in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. The idea was conceptualized in Ottoman political writings such as Kınalızade Ali Çelebi’s (d. 1572) Ahlak-i ‘Ala’i (1565), Hasan Kâfî Akhisarî’s Usulü’l-Hikem fi Nizamı’l-Alem (1596), Koçi Bey’s Risale (1631) and Katib Çelebi’s Düsturü’l-‘amel (1652-53).8 Kınalızade’s version which repeats an aphorism attributed to Aristotle’s letter of advice to Alexander the Great is the following: “Justice leads to the rightness of the world; the world is a garden, its walls are the state; the state is ordered by the shari‘a; the shari‘a is not guarded except by the king; the king cannot rule except through an army; the army is summoned only by wealth; wealth is accumulated by the subjects; the subjects are made servants of the ruler by justice.”9 11 To put it in more concrete terms, rather than highlighting the specific virtues of the ruler, the “circle of justice” most often defined a model of good administration and governance, albeit mostly in relation to the ruler, but through more abstract notions of state, justice and the prosperity of the subjects. This does not mean that the idea of “circle of justice” was a contribution of the Ottomans to Islamic politics. On the contrary, the idea of the circle was also a very ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern philosophical tradition which had an impact on political thinking. The Near Eastern conception of the state puts the ruler, with divine appointment, at the center of the polity in which he had a reciprocal relationship with his subjects through production, taxation and justice, above all the other classes in the society (Darling 2008). There were of course variations in the Ottoman model, too: While Kınalızade situated the sultan apart from different classes in society, Hasan Kafi counted him as one of the members of the military class (Hagen 2005: 63-4). Yet, there was almost no disagreement among Ottoman political thinkers that Ottoman society was organized in social classes (i.e. the men of the sword, the men of the pen, the men of agriculture and the men of commerce and trade), and, that the sultan was responsible of creating a balance among them by keeping “everybody in due place.”10

12 What made the “circle of justice” apparently more appealing to the Ottomans in later centuries was the circle’s intrinsic emphasis on institutionalized governmental structures more than the personal virtues of the sultan. To establish a reciprocal system of governance and organize the social relationships between different classes

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and groups in an anticipated balance, the circle implies that there must be specialized institutions such as the finances to manage the agricultural infrastructure provided by the state, laws and revenue surveys, and the courts of petitions. Thus, the idea of circle served the interests of the Ottomans who were in a process of state formation and bureaucratization through different institutions after the sixteenth century. 13 The Ottomans used this aggregative repertoire in their praxis of politico-administrative jurisdiction. The necessity of maintaining public order through administrative and penal regulations gave rise to Ottoman legal institutions, as had also happened in other Muslim societies before the Ottomans. Parallel to the shari‘a courts which were the principle legal institutions throughout the Empire, the Imperial Council (Divan-ı Hümayun) as a legislative and executive court administered public order through imperial statutes and decrees. It was in fact established upon the medieval Islamic notion of mazalim jurisdiction. Mazalim, literally “injustice and wrongful deeds,” was again directly related to the idea that, a Muslim sovereign, as the trustee of public order, was responsible for removing injustices. Mazalim courts which allowed subjects to petition directly the caliph in the case of injustices perpetrated by official and semi- official powers were established in medieval Islamic Arab and Iranian states before the emergence of the Ottoman Empire.11 One can again notice that the Near Eastern conception of the ruler as the one who protects subjects from the power elite resonates in this understanding of mazalim jurisdiction. 14 The Imperial Council was in fact the embodiment of the idea of “circle of justice” in which the moral virtues associated with the ruler were institutionalized. It functioned as a parallel but superior judiciary organ that heard petitions, judged some important cases of petitioners in its own court (divan) or sent imperial orders to provincial governors and judges in order to resolve issues there. The judicial and administrative roles of the sultan in the Divan started to diminish first by Mehmed II (r. 1451-1481) and were gradually transferred to the grand-vizier and his government through the physical as well as functional move of the Divan-ı Hümayun to the “Council of the Pasha’s Gate” (Paşakapısı Divanı) beginning from the sixteenth century towards the eighteenth century.12 However, it still symbolized the abstract notion of “good governance” and “justice” that is perceived as the responsibility of the sultan towards his subjects in the circular, reciprocal relationship between the state and the subjects.13 Put another way, injustices in society ought to be prevented by this governmental institution that embodied the sultan who was responsible of restoring social balance. 15 The association of justice and the legitimacy of the government symbolized in the Imperial Council took more pragmatic political shape in Ottoman reform literature by the late seventeenth century. On the one hand, informing this shift from the “personal” moral virtues of the ruler towards the “political” appeared as critiques of particular policies of the government might be considered “the dissolution of the moral discourse over legitimacy” (Hagen 2005: 80) or “gradual abandonment of ethical approach” (Sariyannis 2011: 136). On the other hand, defining legitimacy through justice and the other way around can also be read as part of the process of the bureaucratization and institutionalization which enabled authors to envisage a reform agenda through practical administrative measures. For example, some authors compiled private law books (kanunname) based on both old (kadim) and contemporary statutes from imperial registers to be implemented. Risale-i Kavanîn-i âl-i Osman der hulasa-i mezamin defter-i divan by Ayn’ Ali Efendi, secretary of the Register of Imperial Revenues (Defter-i Hakani

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Emini) in 1610 (1018)14 and Telhisü’l-beyan fî kavanîn-i âl-i Osman by the historian Hezarfen Hüseyin Efendi in 1675-76 (1086)15 can be counted within this genre.16 16 Yet, such a move from the persona of the sultan to a more abstract and institutionalized notion of governance and politics does not necessarily eliminate the conception of justice and legitimacy through a moral glance. As Ferguson reminds us in analyzing Ottoman treatises, legitimacy always “rests on moral principles” (Ferguson 2010: 106). It is true that the circular understanding that legitimacy derives from the justice of the government towards the subjects (re‘aya) was no longer the primary criterion of good governance for Ottoman treatise writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ottoman treatise writers came from the same elite circles who were threatened by the re‘aya’s intrusion into their class privileges and understood this as something that undermined the social balance that the sultan was supposed to preserve (Hagen 2005: 80; Ferguson 2010: 106-7). Yet, on the other hand, the political theory espoused by the Ottoman elite does not necessarily reflect the perspective of re‘aya on justice and legitimacy of the government. As Hagen rightfully notes about legitimizing discourse in advice literature, the taxpaying subjects who are “allegedly active participants in the discourse on legitimacy, are conceived in this discourse as mute objects of justice or injustice” acting as “God’s tools in punishing the unjust ruler” (Hagen 2005: 82). He also warns researchers to acknowledge the essential difference between “construing the subjects as God’s tools or as social agents disputing legitimacy” to be able to see the nuances between historical ideas and the “‘objective’ mechanisms” (ibid.: 83). 17 What I want to do in the rest of this paper is primarily to take into account the mechanisms in which the Ottoman subjects have found legal means to act as agents disputing legitimacy. I look at the interaction between the government and its subjects through petitioning the Imperial Council and analyze the legal discourse mutually deployed in this interaction in order to demonstrate a continuation of a reciprocal relationship between the state and the subjects through legitimacy and justice. I also argue that the notion of honor played a central role in claims over legitimacy and justice in such a mutually constructed relationship in the eighteenth century. Thus, moral discourse over legitimacy continued but on different terms due to changing social and political dynamics in the following centuries.

Legitimacy, Honor and Sexual Violence

18 The exercise of power and the maintenance of peace and order for its subjects in itself was always one of the principle sources of legitimacy for the Ottoman political authority.17 Yet, one of the legitimizing strategies of early-modern Ottoman state in the eighteenth century was its claim to protect the honor of its subjects.18 The protection of honor was closely connected with the maintenance of law and order in society, especially in the provinces where local power brokers were threatening the “honor” of the state, too. The reconfiguration of power structure as a result of economic and social restructuring in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in favor of monetary economy and introduction of a more decentralized system of tax-farming affected and increased the legal surveillance by the Ottoman state. The fragmented power structure and increasing autonomy of the provincial powers triggered a vigilant scrutiny of public and social order by the Ottoman state in this period. In this changing

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relationship between the Ottoman central government and its subjects, the petitioning process must have played an important role in the intermingling of different genres and in transmission of moral values and legal categories reflecting these values. Just like the mutual rhetorical usage of “banditry” by the Ottoman state and its subjects,19 so too the notion of honor and the legal term hetk-i ‘ırz (violation of honor) had been established in this dialogic process.20

19 Why was this “politics of honor,” most of the time associated with sexual honor, a legitimizing strategy for the Ottoman state? Scott Taylor explains this in relation to the notion of justice: “Honor creates the polite fiction of autonomy for those who are, in truth, subordinate, and allows both the dominant and subordinate to accept that this state of affairs is just. In this way, honor and sexual could be touchstones for the legitimacy of power. If everyone feels honored, then the hierarchical distribution of power can seem fair; but if the subjects of empire feel humiliated, the power that acts on them becomes illegitimate. The subjects then have justification for rebellion or any other violent act that can reclaim their autonomy and honor” (Taylor 2011: 306-7). 20 This is in fact exactly what rests behind the idea of “circle of justice:” There must be a “consent” given by a subordinate to the hegemonic power, and the latter should in return provide a sense of justice by honoring the subjects through protection. In such a formulation, protecting the honor of its subjects through establishing a moral order also means protecting the political power’s own legitimacy and honor on the eyes of its subjects.

21 In this sense, the politics of honor in the early-modern Ottoman polity was a dialogic process, as the notion of honor was a rhetorical rather than structural code that mediated social relations. It was not “structure, provoking a predictable response to any given predicament,” but rather “a resource that both states and their subjects could invoke in crisis, and something that both groups needed to safeguard in order to sanction their own behavior and status” (ibid.: 309). As we will see in more detail in the following pages, the legal terms associating sexuality with honor were generally used in petitions in which the early-modern central government and subjects were in dialogue with each other, albeit in an indirect manner. Petitioners were well aware of the power of rhetoric. They knew that their petitions must attract the attention of the Imperial Council personnel to be considered worthy of a hearing in the Imperial Council. The crafting of a plausible narrative—albeit within the limits of the official language—was at the center of the petitioning activity. However, as Natalie Zemon Davis brilliantly shows in her study of letters of remission in sixteenth-century France, looking at the “fictional” aspects of these documents is not inevitably a “quest for fraud” or “forgery” (Davis 1987: 3-4). Rather, looking at how the narratives were formulated through this collaborative endeavor and seeing what kind of rhetorical strategies were employed gives us important clues about the moral and social sensibilities of Ottoman subjects. 22 Let us see a petition submitted to the Imperial Council in Istanbul by a man who was an inhabitant of Ankara, a provincial city in Central Anatolia, in 1744. In this petition, Hasan Beşe, the husband of Fatime, seeks justice against those who committed sexual assault against his wife: May you, most excellent and merciful master, be well and strong!

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I, your humble slave, am an inhabitant of the village of Yıldırım el-viran of the district of Şorba in Ankara. While my wife Fatime was taking care of her land with no harm or offense to anyone, Hacıoğlu Kadri, an inhabitant of the same village, being one among the harmful bandits, “broke into my house” at night and committed an “indecent act” (fi‘l-i şeni‘) with my wife and “violated (her/our) honor” (hetk-i ‘ırz) and committed “mischief” (fesad). Since the aforementioned Kadri has run away, I kindly request an imperial order of yours addressing the judges of Ankara and Şorba and the governor of Ankara for resolving the case when he is captured and establishing justice according to the fetva of the chief mufti that I present here. Your humble servant, Karabaşoğlu Hasan Beşe21 23 Although the couple’s experience of the event and their sorrow were of course singular, the description of case in the petition was not unique at all. There is a host of legal documents, including petitions, imperial decrees and court records describing other events in mid-eighteenth-century Anatolia in almost exactly the same way the above petition describes the sexual assault on Fatime. Certain legal terms like “indecent act” (fi‘l-i şeni‘) “violation of honor” (hetk-i ‘ırz) or expressions like “breaking into the house” were repeated to describe situations of sexual assault. Furthermore, those who committed sexual assault were generally identified as bandits or brigands with the use of a certain terminology such as “mütegallibeden” (being considered / from among the usurpers), “şaki” (robber), and “eşkıya taifesinden” (being a member of the gang of bandits).

24 My research on sexual offense cases in eighteenth-century Ottoman Imperial Council registers of Anatolia (Anadolu Ahkam Defterleri)22 and petitions revealed two interesting phenomena: First, there were many more petitions and imperial decrees concerning sexual offenses than I had expected to find since I was basically assuming that the central government would not bother itself with the ordinary sexual involvements of Ottoman subjects. Second, there was an abundance of complaints by Ottoman subjects against the violence of certain “bandits” in their local towns in Anatolia. These petitions and the imperial decrees mention not only generic types of violence associated with banditry, such as plundering crops, attacking houses and killing innocent people, but also, and with almost no exception, incidents concerning their sexual violence. The juxtaposition of these two issues, that is, the central government’s surprising interest in sexual crime and petitions specifically mentioning the sexual violence of bandits alongside the other crimes, is crucial for also understanding the symbolic meaning of other contemporary forms of violence that accompanied sexual violence. 25 The case brilliantly reveals the central role of sexual violence as one of the most important indicators of the accused being habituated to “violence,” namely being bandit. At this point, it is important to consider why sexual violence was one of the important symbols of excessive “violence,” tantamount to transgressing the gender order as well as the order and rules of the state. Here, the notion of “honor” and the question of whose honor was sullied with sexual assault becomes paramount. 26 Islamic literature favors expressions related to privacy, whereas, the definition of the public sphere in pre-modern Islam starts with the inverse of this private. The terms such as haram/mahzur (forbidden), sir/maktum (secret), sitr (veiling), hurma (inviolability), ‘awra (anything that man conceals by reason of shame or prudency) occupy a larger space than antonymic concepts such as ‘alaniyya (open, manifest), or

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tashhir (making well-known, notorious) (Lange, Fierro 2009: 4). So, the public sphere in pre-modern Islam is defined as the negative of the private, that is, the sphere of life which is not protected from unwanted intrusions of power. Definitions of privacy in the Islamic context imply not only territorial and spatial privacy but also two other inviolabilities: the privacy and dignity of the human body and the inviolability of the reputation and honor of a person. Violence in this context is the act of unveiling others and “tearing apart the veil of integrity” (hetk-i ‘ırz).23 Sexuality is in the intersection, and the very inner core of three components of the definitions of privacy, that is, the inviolability of space, body and honor, and thus an attack to the sexual sphere represents violation of the space, body and honor, all together, in Islamic and early- modern Ottoman world. 27 In fact, one of the most frequently encountered terms in eighteenth-century legal documents in which the central government and the petitioners used in their correspondences is hetk-i ‘ırz. The term was often coupled with “bandits” and used to describe certain people’s cruelty and assaults on others’ honor, i.e., assaulting their family, wives and children, slandering them, and in certain cases physically attacking them, as we have seen in our example. The offenses of breaking into others’ houses and assaulting women and girls, and specifically committing sexual assault (fi‘l-i şeni‘) against a certain woman, girl or boy were generally described by the term hetk-i ‘ırz in these documents. 28 In our exemplary case, the violation of all three dimensions of privacy is apparent: the accused violates territorial immunity by “breaking into house,” then violates the right of the inviolability of human body by sexually assaulting Fatime, and as a result, violates the honor of the couple. But most importantly, the honor of Hasan Beşe, the one responsible for protecting his wife’s body and reputation in a patriarchal society, is also sullied. All of these acts were defined by the term hetk-i ‘ırz in the petition. Yet, the violation of the privacy of an Ottoman woman or man was not only a private act of violence, but also a public one that also violated the honor of the Ottoman state, too. In other words, the violation of the private was also a violation of the state’s claim to its monopoly over legitimate violence as the sole authority to interfere and destroy the privacy of its subjects’ bodies. 29 I argue that this intensive association of honor and sexuality through the usage of the term hetk-i ‘ırz highlighted in petitions Ottoman subjects sent to the Imperial Council points to a discursive shift in how morality was negotiated to mediate relations among Ottoman subjects, local and imperial officials, as well as the imperial center in the eighteenth century. While, by the nineteenth century such a regulation of morals was accentuated more in governmental thinking and the technologies of the modern state, as will be discussed in the following section, its roots were based in the relationship of the Ottoman imperial government and its subjects in the eighteenth century. By claiming that it “protected (the) honor” of its subjects against those who threatened them, the imperial power attempted to usurp both the existing customary powers such as that of community and newly emerging provincial powers that the central state vaguely labeled as “bandits” or “outlaws” in order to gain control over moral order in society.

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Tanzimat Reforms – “Life, Honor and Property,” and the Gendered Citizen in the Criminal Code

30 The increasing emphasis both Ottoman subjects and the imperial government placed on honor by manipulating it as a legal discourse in eighteenth-century petitioning enabled the imperial power to categorize and punish sexual offenses more effectively on the principle of ta‘zir (discretionary punishment) through the politico- administrative jurisdiction of the government. By creating its own terminology such as “violation of honor” (hetk-i ‘ırz) and “indecent act” (fi‘l-i şeni‘), politico-legal praxis created a way to avoid the stringent shari‘a rules on zina (fornication and adultery) and regulate the public order on moral terms on its own discretion.24 This was not in fact alien to the idea of the “circle of justice” that legitimized the relationship between the government and its subjects in the classical Ottoman politico-legal theory: the sovereign was responsible for the well-being of his subjects by preventing oppression and injustice in return of the latter’s consent and support (in the form of taxation) for the government. The “circle” has been preserved by the political and material support of the subjects to the government who provided honor and prosperity to them in return. In this circular notion of justice, honor was the touchstone for the legitimacy of power.

31 It was the Tanzimat Edict of 1839 that actually codified this new relationship between the government and the subjects on the basis of the protection of “life, honor and property.” Moreover, we frequently come across the terms “violation of honor” (hetk-i ‘ırz) and “indecent act” (fi‘l-i şeni‘) utilized as regular and mainstream terminology in the nineteenth century. Although the Criminal Code of 1851 (Kanun-ı Cedid) contained few criminal offenses and used the term hetk-i namus only once (Akgündüz 1986: 825), fi‘l-i şeni‘ and hetk-i ‘ırz became the usual and most-frequently used terms, replacing zina and diversifying sexual crimes in the Criminal Code of 1858. The usage of these two terms in this Code gives us more clues about their meanings in the previous centuries as well; hetk-i ‘ırz was used as an umbrella heading under which different types of fi‘l-i şeni‘ offenses such as adultery, defloration, rape, sodomy and molestation were put together (ibid.: 864-66). The emphasis on honor in conceptualizing sexual offenses and sexuality becomes more apparent when such clustering was codified. However, the usage of the term in the eighteenth century was no different; it referred to the violation of one’s honor through various assaults on a person among which sexual assault was the most disgraceful. 32 Interestingly enough, the French Penal Code of 1810, from which the Ottoman Criminal Code of 1858 was adopted, used the French version of hetk-i ‘ırz in the heading: “ Attentats aux mœurs” (Attacks upon morals).25 Moreover, the same terminology seems to have been used in the Egyptian legal code as early as 1830.26 Yet, it appears that the idea of “violation of honor” and “attacks upon morality” in Ottoman legal language precedes the era of legal reform both in the Ottoman Empire and in France.27 Therefore, just as the old kanunnames were codifications of an amalgam of customary law and shari‘a,28 the criminal codes of the nineteenth century can be read as a codification and institutionalization of Ottoman legal custom and terminology which was already in use during the eighteenth century and even before—albeit influenced in the nineteenth century by foreign practices, too. Furthermore, the use of a language which was not directly borrowed from Islamic jurisprudence and the appearance of this terminology

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in nineteenth century codes can also be read as a continuation of a kanun tradition that created its own language and legal culture, though not necessarily contradictory to that of the shari‘a. Concentrating on a well-preserved notion of justice revolved around the idea of the “circle of justice” instead of creating a binary between the shari‘a and kanun, or shari‘a and Tanzimat reforms, enable us to understand the prevalence of honor as one of the most important legitimizing parameters of justice.29 33 The Tanzimat Edict of 1839 which initiated the bureaucratic and institutional reforms of the following decades was actually established upon the traditional concept of a “just ruler,” at least in the discursive level (Darling 2008: 23). It legitimized the changes and reforms through the idea of “circle of justice,” by connecting justice, popular prosperity and the strength of the state: “Indeed there is nothing more precious in this world than life and honor. What man, however much his character may be against violence, can prevent himself from having recourse to it, and thereby injure the government and the country, if his life and honor are endangered? If, on the contrary, he enjoys perfect security, it is clear that he will not depart from ways of loyalty, and all his actions will contribute to the welfare of the government and of the people. If there is an absence of security for property, everyone remains indifferent to his state and his community; no one interests himself in the prosperity of the country, absorbed as he is in his own troubles and worries. If, on the contrary, the individual feels complete security about his possessions then he will become preoccupied with his own affairs, which he will seek to expand, and his devotion and love for his state and his community will steadily grow and will undoubtedly spur him into becoming a useful member of society” (Hurewitz 1975: 269-71). 34 The political idiom and rhetoric used in the routine bureaucratic correspondence during the Tanzimat period was also established upon “a state ideology of order cum prosperity” (Reinkowski 2005: 200). Two images of cyclical order, which are the circle of justice and the incessant alternation between order and disorder, emerge repeatedly in the vast material of Tanzimat bureaucratic correspondence cited in Maurus Reinkowski’s research (ibid.: 200-3). Yet, the new Tanzimat reforms were to be justified by shifting the ideological stress away from the preservation of the social order toward the prosperity that would result from good administration (Darling 2008: 25). The Tanzimat Edict stated that the new period would be only the beginning of “further beneficial and advantageous measures to make certain the execution of orders insuring the well-being of the people, rich and poor, whose happy state is a necessary precondition for the reinvigoration of religion and state and the prosperity of country and nation” (İnalcık 1965: 4; rpt in İnalcık, 1978).

35 Since the idea of “circle of justice” has promoted the politico-administrative jurisdiction of the government (siyasa) as the judicial enforcer, Tanzimat reforms were in conformity with this idea not only in the discursive field but also in practice as well. The intensification and proliferation of state control over finances with an attempt to abolish tax farming, “exerting control directly over its subjects as individuals rather than dealing with groups through intermediaries” and the “reconsolidation of lawmaking and administration in official hands” (Darling 2008: 27) by the Tanzimat reforms can be read as a continuation of the efforts of the central government to exert control over public order in the eighteenth century.30 The strengthening of bureaucracy over the ulama or the “triumph of the ‘men of pen’ over magistrates” as Şerif Mardin (2009: 260) formulated as well as the establishment of new councils and courts for legislative and executive purposes constitute the crystallization of the

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appellate system that had already derogated the independent power of the kadı with the rise of the authority of the governors’ and the imperial councils in the eighteenth century. Even the transformation of the private and public law “into two increasingly distinct spheres” (Mardin 2009: 262) was a gradual process that started well before the Tanzimat and continued well beyond establishment of the Turkish Republic.31 36 Yet, the predisposition of the Ottoman political power towards scrutinizing social order in the eighteenth century was not then comparable with the endeavors and means of the Ottoman state during the nineteenth century. The eighteenth-century early modern power was not only deprived of the “disciplines and technologies of power” over a “deployment of sexuality” but also of the desire to create “docile bodies” through a panoptical surveillance of the subjects (Foucault 1978 and 1995). For example, in this period punishments were not yet standardized, uniformed or quantified but rather left to the “discretion” of law-enforcers. A correlation of the length of imprisonment with the severity of the crime, or the universalization of penalties in relation to the crimes, was established only by legal reforms of the nineteenth century. Whereas for example regulations concerning judicial and administrative authorities issued in 1838 still determined the punishment for “bribery” according to status (of the administrator), just like principle of discretionary punishment in the eighteenth century, the penal codes of 1840 and 1858 were constructed more in accordance with a discourse on “equality” and attempted to establish a universal principle of punishment based on the crime committed.32 Furthermore, various councils, both at the imperial center and in the provinces, that were established throughout the nineteenth century worked within a more hierarchized and institutionalized appellate structure, compared to the loosely hierarchized appellate triangle of the kadı court, governor’s council and the Imperial Council in the eighteenth century.33 Within this highly hierarchized judicial system, the scope of the legal jurisdiction of the local judges and their courts became narrower in the nineteenth century than in the eighteenth century (Agmon 2006: 68-73 and 235-38). 37 However, one can still recognize a path in governmental mentality which proceeds from the eighteenth towards the nineteenth century even though it is neither a trouble-free nor a linear path. One observes continuity especially in the development of new parameters between the government and its subjects on moral terms through a mutual claim on honor. Ruth A. Miller accurately defines the Tanzimat period as an “explicit intent of constructing a modern—understood in the early nineteenth century as liberal—imperial state.” The 1839 Edict promised “a legally homogeneous Ottoman citizenry the right to life, honor, and property” (Miller 2005: 355-6). In this sense, the Tanzimat Edict was a proto-constitution defining the relationship between the state and its subjects on the basis of “rights and duties” deriving from abstract legal norms such as honor. In this political schema in which citizenship has been established upon the abstraction of “equality” and “rights,” Miller argues, rights were granted or acquired mostly through defining reproduction as one of the most basic attributes of citizenship and political duty of the citizens. In other words, the modern state puts sexuality and reproduction at the center of citizenship thanks to its bio-political concerns of “protecting life” from a Foucauldian point of view.34 In this sense, the coupling of “life, honor and property”—property as a prerequisite for being a liberal citizen—in the Tanzimat Edict and emphasis put on the notion of “honor” as an umbrella unifying sexual violence and adultery under one heading in the Tanzimat legal codifications in

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the following decades are not surprising according to this new bio-political model of rights and citizenship. 38 One observes concrete outcomes of the abstraction of “honor” of the Tanzimat Edict in the Criminal Code of 1858. In the criminal code, “honor” acquires a gendered character as opposed to its universal liberal abstraction in the Tanzimat Edict. 35 First of all, it is sexualized by its association with all sorts of sexual crimes ranging from sexual molestation to adultery in ten articles under a separate heading of hetk-i ‘ırz (violation of honor). Secondly, it is gendered through: crime and punishment of sexual assault and rape were differentiated according to the victim’s gender and age, i.e., they were all different if the crime was against adult men and women, “virgin girls” and boys. Similarly, the penalties for the procurement of “young” men and women varied. Finally, the adultery of husbands and wives was also treated differently.36 39 In this construction, women were mostly defined as victims, that is to say, “passive” subjects whose rights to “honor” should be protected by the state.37 Yet, they were also envisioned as active subjects, albeit only under one circumstance: as adulterous wives. The new criminal code—different from its antecedents such as the old criminal code, the kanunname of Süleyman in the sixteenth century—confined fornication within the boundaries of the “family” by giving the right of litigation (against the adulterous wife and her lover) only to the male guardian (e.g., either the husband or the father of the woman in the absence of a husband). In this sense, women became active subject- citizens through their sexuality only when they were defined as reproductive members of the family, albeit from a negative angle: as the ones whose sexuality should be controlled by the collaboration of the two patriarchs—the state and the patriarch of the family. In other words, the honor of both the state and the family was to be protected through the regulation and control of women’s sexuality. In this constitutional agreement, the man negotiated his rights with and promised loyalty to the political sovereign in return for the guarantee of the sovereign’s protecting his honor in controlling the wife’s sexuality. The woman also obtained her “rights” of being protected from sexual assault, though at the same time, consenting the duplication of the control over her sexuality through the state’s hands. As part of the negotiation between patriarchs, the man also promised the father state not to commit adultery under the sacred roof of the house where he lives with his wife. He was going to be judged only when his wife lodged a complaint. Nevertheless, the penalty for the adulterous husband was much lesser than that of the adulterous wife: only the payment of a fine compares starkly to the adulterous wife’s punishment by imprisonment from three months to two years.38 40 Hence, the boundaries of the “honor” of the individuals were set by the conjugal family. If the wife commits adultery no matter how and where, the male guardian was the only one who was authorized to “protect” his or her honor. If the husband committed adultery, then the state gave authority to the wife but only in case when her husband’s adultery takes place within the boundaries of the “sacred” house. Otherwise, the other articles of the 1858 Criminal Code concerning the “violation of honor” are all related to non-consensual sexual acts: either rape (cebren fi‘l-i şeni‘), molestation, or female and male trafficking/prostitution. The code apparently lacks any statutes on consensual illicit sex outside the family bond. This actually signifies an important shift in the legal surveillance of sexuality; the state replaces the community with the family in its partnership of regulating sexuality. Whereas the community was responsible for

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monitoring and reporting all sorts of illicit sexuality and “violation of honor” to the courts, now the “gendered citizen” in the family is responsible for protecting the honor of him, the family and the state.

In Lieu of Conclusion

41 Thinking about honor as a tool that legitimizes inequality through the rhetoric of justice has enabled us to find cohesion in the governmental mentality of the Ottoman imperial power in its emphasis on the protection of honor as the new parameter determining the relationship between the state and its subjects from the eighteenth century onwards. While the idea of justice disseminating from the sovereign to its subjects as a guarantee of prosperity and government was on the one hand present in the theory of “circle of justice” and siyasa shar‘iyya as well as their application in the Ottoman legal practice in the early-modern period, on the other hand one should note/ acknowledge that technologies of the modern state and its disposition towards the population and family for protecting life and honor starting from the nineteenth century onwards were novel.

42 This helps us better understand why the Ottomans adopted the French Penal Code of 1810 for a more “modern” criminal legislation of 1858 while there was already an available theoretical and legislative framework for legitimizing state’s intervention on sexuality on the basis of honor. Rather than blindly adopting foreign concepts wholesale, it shows us how the Ottomans inscribed indigenous concepts of law and sovereignty into a foreign vocabulary of governance that had all of the trappings of modernity and progress. Although the historical role of the notion of honor in the construction of subjection/subjectivity in French history has not been explored in this paper, the French code locating the family—with implicit reference to the nuclear family—instead of the community at the center of the definition of the illicit sex was novel for the Ottomans. It apparently fitted well into the liberal attempts of the Ottoman imperial power which aimed to create “Ottoman subjects” on the basis of a universal-yet-gendered definition of citizenship around the idea of protection of life, honor and property through the institution of the family. While it remained outside the scope of this paper, the fundamental question of how such an increasing emphasis on family and reproduction in the discourse of honor that legitimized more scrutiny and control over sexuality through codified legislation and disciplinary institutions actually affected people’s daily experience of sexuality and gender dynamics in the society should be investigated further.

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NOTES

1. The modern constitutions of Hungary, South Africa, Switzerland and Iran as well as the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union acknowledge the inviolability of human dignity. 2. For a discussion of three different meanings of dignity, namely the dignity of the individual associated with autonomy and negative freedom; the positive dignity of maintaining a particular type of life; and the dignity of recognition of individual and group differences that have been applied in the U.S. constitutional courts, see Rao 2011. 3. The term “honor” has various forms in Turkish as well as in their Arabic and Persian origins. While onur and şeref have more neutral meanings of reputation, fame and dignity, namus, ‘iffet, ‘ izzet and ‘ırz have more gender-specific meanings of women’s chastity and virtue, and male control of women’s sexuality. In this paper, I try to follow the historical meanings of the terms, especially of ‘ırz in its usage of the legal term hetk-i ‘ırz (violation of honor). 4. The preamble of the 1982 constitution as amended on July 23, 1995; Act No. 4121. 5. Onurlu as being used in the Turkish constitution. 6. A shorter version of the circle, first quoted in the ʿUyun̄ al-akhbar̄ (“Fountains information”) of Ibn Qutayba (d. 276/885) can be explained as follows: ‘There can be no government without men, no men without money, no money without prosperity, and no prosperity without justice and good administration’ as being quoted in Darling 2011. The earliest extended version, an aphorism

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attributed to a letter of advice written by Aristotle to Alexander the Great on how to govern his conquests, appeared in an anonymous Arabic encyclopedic work probably from the fourth/tenth century, the Sirr al-asrar̄ : “The world is a garden, hedged about by sovereignty; sovereignty is lordship, preserved by law; law is policy, governed by the king; the king is a shepherd, supported by the army; the army are soldiers, fed by money; money is revenue, gathered by the people; the people are servants, enfolded by justice; justice is harmony, the well-being of the world.” (ibid.). This longer version had apparently been appropriated by the Ottoman writers in very similar formulations. 7. Here I borrow M. Sariyannis’ translation of Bitlisî and his summary of the four cardinal virtues (ibid.: 124-26). 8. For detailed analyses of these works, see respectively Tezcan 1996; Hagen 2005; İpşirli 1979-80; Sariyannis 2011; Ferguson 2010. For analyses of the legitimizing discourses of justice through the circular view of justice in Ottoman political thinking, see Ergene 2001; Hagen 2005. For a more general discussion of the concept of “circle of justice” in early Islamic empires and throughout the Ottoman history, including the reformation period of the nineteenth century, see Darling 2008. 9. As being translated and quoted in Hagen 2005: 65. 10. Ibid.; also see Ergene 2001: 56-57. 11. Al-Mawardi, a Shafi‛i jurist of the eleventh century who discusses extensively the relationship between mazalim and siyasa in his Kitab al-Ahkam as-Sultaniyyah, held the military governor (amir) responsible for the maintenance of public order and security, whereas, he gave the judge (kadı) the right to adjudicate to protect the rights of individuals in the litigation of private parties: Al-Mawardi 1996. For biographical information on al-Mawardi, see Brockelmann 2012. For a detailed description of mazalim in the early Islamic states and under the Bahri Mamluks, see Nielsen 1985. 12. For an extended analysis of this power shift in the Imperial Council as a symbol of larger transformation in politics and society in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, see Tuğ 2009. 13. Ferguson also pinpoints the dilemma of the sultan still retaining a “highly visible presence in Ottoman reform treatises while being in retreat from the daily administration of imperial affairs as well as from the writers’ conception of justice.” (Ferguson 2010: 97) 14. In fact, Ayn’Ali Efendi’s Risale had been ordered by the Grand Vizier Murad Pasha. It was modified by Ayn’ Ali Efendi by putting in amendments about the salaries of state officials of the time and resubmitted to the grand-vizier in 1018 (Ayn’ Ali Efendi 1863: 83-87). 15. For detailed information about this work, see Babinger 1992; Barkan 1943. 16. For a detailed analysis of these private lawbooks in their relationship with the entire kanun practice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Tuğ 2009: 66-8 and 91-3. Ferguson 2010 makes an intelligent analysis of how Ottoman authors of this period deployed archival sources of the past to create a reform agenda in a way different from the advice literature of the previous generation. See especially ibid.: 109-16. 17. For a detailed and analytical discussion of the legitimizing mechanisms of the Ottoman sultanate, both the normative and factual ones, see Karateke 2005. He considers the establishment of “justice and order” through preventing arbitrary legal processes via courts and institutionalized mechanisms of personal redress as well as the huge corpus of legislation procedures as one of the most important pillars of “factual” legitimacy. 18. The research in this section is primarily based on my Ph.D. dissertation (Tuğ 2009). 19. For detailed historical examples of the rhetorical usage of banditry in the eighteenth- century legal documents, see ibid.: 154-68. Similarly, Tolga Esmer’s contribution to this issue documents well the repertoire of narrative strategies and tropes of the Ottoman officials as well as of the irregular soldiers/bandits in Rumeli during this same period.

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20. By saying this, I do not mean that the notion of honor has been only used or discovered in the legal culture of the eighteenth century. To see how honor and reputation acquired an important moral function in relation to sexual and moral order of the Ottoman society before and after the eighteenth century, see Leslie Peirce contribution to this issue in addition to Peirce 2003; Peirce 1997; Semerdjian 2008; Tucker 1998; Baer 2011. Yet, the term hetk-i ‘ırz (violation of honor) has rarely been used in legal records before the eighteenth century. As I will explain in this section, the novel utilization of this term in the correspondence between the central government and the Ottoman subjects in the eighteenth century points to a construction of a constitutional relationship based on morals. In this sense, this period represents a shift towards a notion of honor as “constitutional contract” from “social contract” defined in Peirce’s contribution to this special edition. 21. Prime Ministry Archive, A.DVN.ŞKT, folder 67, petition 134 (1157/1744). 22. I have specifically researched Anatolian Registers of Imperial Rescripts (Anadolu Ahkam Defterleri), i.e., the imperial petitionary registers of Anatolia written by the Imperial Council in response to the petitions and letters coming from the Anatolian province. It is important here to note that the central government started keeping records of imperial rescripts written in response to petitions coming from ordinary Ottoman subjects and low-level administrators throughout the empire only in the second half of the seventeenth century. These records form a special series called Petition Registers (Sikayeţ Defterleri). More importantly, from 1742 onward, separate registers of such rescripts known as Provincial Registers of Imperial Rescripts (Vilayet Ahkam Defterleri) were set up for the most important provinces such as Anadolu, Rumeli, Erzurum, Şam, etc. The series of Anatolian Registers of Imperial Rescripts in the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives in Istanbul contains 186 volumes for the period from 1742 to 1889. I examined two volumes of these registers covering the period between 1742 and 1744; the first one is composed of 284 pages containing 1254 imperial rescripts and the second of 292 pages containing 1248 rescripts. 23. The expression literally means “tearing (one’s) honor” and “disgracing someone.” See Wehr, Cowan 1980: 1018. Interestingly enough, hetk itself acquires a meaning in Arabic which implicitly accommodates “honor,” despite the fact that ‘ırz normally means honor. Moreover, the term hatīka which stems from the same root means “dishonor.” See Farès 2012. 24. For a discussion of the all-encompassing and ambiguous term zina in shari‛a with regard to its blindness to the question of consent (i.e., hardly differentiating rape and fornication in theory) and the stringent rules of conviction of the crime of zina in Islamic law, see Imber 1996; Sonbol 1997; Peirce 2008; Ze’evi 2006: 48-76. For a detailed analysis of different terminology used to replace zina and the use of “discretionary punishment” to penalize sexual crimes more effectively and “centrally” in the eighteenth-century legal practice, see Tuğ 2009: 173-311. 25. “Attentats aux mœurs” in livre III, titre II, section IV in Code pénal de 1810 (Texte intégral - État lors de sa promulgation en 1810), URL: http://ledroitcriminel.free.fr/la_legislation_criminelle/ anciens_textes/code_penal_de_1810.htm (accessed July 1, 2014). For its English version, see The Penal Code of France 1819. 26. Illegal defloration (izalat bakarat bint) was considered among the offenses against a person’s honor (hatk ‘ird). See Kozma 2001: 2; Peters 1997: 81-82. 27. Despite the fact that it is beyond the limits of this paper, it would be interesting to explore whether there were any interaction between the early-modern legal cultures of the Ottomans and French which would have created such a common terminology as reflected in their codified penal codes of the nineteenth century. 28. For a detailed analysis of kanun in the early-modern Ottoman world, see Tuğ 2009: 40-96. 29. For recent approaches challenging the binary between shari‛a and kanun, see Tuğ 2009; Ferguson 2010; Stilt 2011.

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30. For a similar analysis which construes the Ottoman legal system in the eighteenth century as the building stone of the “modern penal system” established through penal reforms of the nineteenth century, see Zarinebaf 2010: 175-81. 31. Fahmy (forthcoming) makes a brilliant analysis of the simultaneous and blurred use of both kanun and shari‛a in these reformed courts and councils in Mehmed Ali’s Egypt. 32. Cengiz Kırlı’s 2006 study on the “invention” of corruption in the penal code of 1840 vividly demonstrates how a new legal discourse on “equality” was constructed on universalizing punishment based on the crime. Yet, crimes against honor and slander were still punished according to the old principle of discretionary punishment in criminal laws of both 1840 and 1851. In other words, the punishments of the state officials and ulama were determined differently according to their status by the superior councils (Meclis-i Ahkam-ı Adliye for 1840 and Meclis-i Vala for 1851). For the full text of the penal codes of 1840 and 1858, see Akgündüz 1986: 808-76. Miller (2005: 52-55) sees a pattern of intensification of a shift from the concept of victim losing “any importance it may once have had” to a situation where the “life” of the state overrides “the ‘life’ of the inherently deviant individual” from 1840 to 1858. In other words, she highlights the intensification of the emphasis made to the political crimes and crimes against the state over ordinary crimes against people and property. Although I do not agree with her emphasis on the rupture from the previous period, I agree that the state’s legal attention was on political crimes and bureaucratic legal centralization. It is my contention that the universalizing punishments based on the crime worked parallel to this bureaucratic centralization and state’s anxieties about political crimes. 33. For these various councils established throughout the nineteenth century, see Bingöl 2004; Ekinci 2004; Çadırcı 1985; Rubin 2011. 34. For a recent study that analyzes Ottoman reproduction policies such as the professionalization of midwives, a ban on abortion and greater medical care during pregnancy as part of a plan of population growth in the late nineteenth century, see Balsoy 2013. 35. In fact, the criminal law of 1858 was much more detailed in defining crimes and punishments compared to 1840 and 1851 laws. It was partly because it adopted a much more detailed 1810 Napoleonic criminal code and, most importantly, because it was twenty years later than the first Ottoman criminal code (1838) in the nineteenth century. 36. See Miller 2005: 366-8 for a detailed analysis of the articles concerning adultery in both the Ottoman and French Code. 37. Miller (2005: 363 n.15) defines this citizenship right as “negative” right, that is, the right not to be coerced. 38. Supplement to Article 201. See Akgündüz 1986: 865-66.

ABSTRACTS

This article aims to historicize the notion of honor in the Ottoman legal discourse and practice from the early-modern period to the so-called “reform era”, the era most scholars maintain began with the Tanzimat Edict of 1839. Such a historical approach uses justice as a key to understand honor not as a value system, but as a rhetoric. Thus, it problematizes an a-historical conception of honor which assumes that honor codes in modern societies are largely the legacy of “traditional” norms of the pre-modern periods. This study argues that the persistent emphasis

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on honor in the correspondence especially between the central government and the Ottoman subjects in the eighteenth century reflects the development of new parameters between the state and its subjects in moral terms. On the one hand, the motto of “life, honor and property” of the Tanzimat Edict represents a continuation of such discourse of honor as a legitimizing mechanism. Yet, on the other hand, the legal codification of honor in the Criminal Codes of the nineteenth century reflects a novel constitutional construction of gendered citizenship around reproduction in the conjugal family through the partnership of the patriarchal state and the male subjects.

INDEX

Keywords: honor, sexual violence, gender, violation of honor, justice, legitimacy, circle of justice, public order, Ottoman Empire, eighteenth century, Tanzimat, criminal law, criminal code

AUTHOR

BAŞAK TUĞ

Assistant Professor, Bilgi University Department of History

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The Precarious Intimacy of Honor in Late Ottoman Accounts of Para- militarism and Banditry

Tolga Uğur Esmer

1 This essay sets up a dialogue between discourses in the self-narrative of an irregular cavalryman (deli) Deli Mustafa that recounts the campaigns he took part from 1801/2 to 1825 and corpus of Ottoman archival sources written about Kara Feyzi, an irregular soldier (sekbân) and bandit leader who marshaled a successful, trans-regional organized crime network that pillaged Ottoman Rumeli from 1793 to 1823. Deli Mustafa, or Kabudlı el-Haccî Vasfî Efendi1 as he is fashioned on the title page of the only surviving manuscript of his narrative, provides rare glimpses into the tumultuous everyday life and moral dilemmas faced by countless Ottoman irregular soldiers, or “military laborers,” who hailed from the Muslim peasantry and joined paramilitary bands either for social mobility or protection against similar types of bands that roamed the Empire during this period.2 Deli Mustafa’s narrative and self-fashioning strategies help us understand what common Muslim men serving as itinerate soldiers had to do to make a living during this tumultuous period of Ottoman history, and most important, how they understood and explained their contentious ways of life as honorable and legitimate based on a common understanding of a masculine ethos and aesthetic shared by groups across social divides.3

2 In contrast, the corpus of official correspondence about Kara Feyzi reveals his spectacular trajectory from a common, itinerate soldier like Deli Mustafa into a wily bandit leader and imperial power broker. It also tells a larger story about how imperial governance came to depend on wide-spread networks of violence but became imbricated in their criminal activities during this period of Ottoman history. In the era of chronic wars with the Habsburg and Russian Empires, Kara Feyzi represented a new generation of Muslim warrior-entrepreneurs whose violent ways were once sanctioned by the state along its Danubian border to police these spaces and defend attacks against foreign armies during inter-imperial wars. However, by the late eighteenth century, especially during peacetime, they became agents of social disruption whose excesses

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gradually became a fact of everyday life.4 Different kinds of officials running the gamut from local a‘yân (notables) to prominent vezîrs (imperial ministers) documented this transformation over time in numerous dispatches they sent to Istanbul about Kara Feyzi. Together, this large corpus of sources sheds light on a repertoire of narrative strategies and tropes to which officials resorted to rationalize as well as mask their shady but often lucrative dealings with a man whom they nevertheless publically stigmatized as the enemy of the faith and state (hâ’inü’d-dîn ü devlet). Kara Feyzi and Deli Mustafa’s stories complement each other as they juxtapose a common irregular soldier’s strategies of self-fashioning vis-à-vis imperial officials with the these same types of officials’ strategies of fashioning themselves vis-à-vis irregular soldier/bandits and, in the process, reflect all of these groups’ own professional identities, concern for their reputations, and shared angst. Together, they shed light on much larger interpretative and moral communities forged upon the same kinds of “texts,” narrative strategies, group experiences, exchange of material and symbolic resources, or simply a concept like honor woven throughout the narratives discussed below. 3 The concept of honor and shame in the social sciences as envisioned by twentieth- century anthropologists of the Mediterranean has been the source of much controversy and criticism. Most criticisms revolve around the fact that honor and shame have been portrayed as timeless, immutable social structures throughout the Mediterranean, which, in turn, served as the basis for specious theories about the unity of the region (Albera 2006).5 However, this homogeneity was often based on superficial comparisons and assumed a priori rather than demonstrated (Herzfeld 1984). Skeptics have pointed out that the reification of the concept in anthropology was also rooted in northern European political agendas that sought to justify disparities of power in European politics and economy: the anthropologists’ formulation of a rural, patriarchal, libidinous, mustached, always-ready-to-act-violently-on-honor Mediterranean male conveniently served to justify the southern man’s inferior position (Pina-Cabral 1989). It has also been argued that in societies whose relations were analyzed by modern anthropologists in terms of honor and shame, the very subjects of research did not use these exact words in their own languages.6 4 Terms for honor only seldom appear in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ottoman sources. Ottoman officials sometimes used the terms ‘ırz (honor), ehl-i ‘ırz zümresinden (from among honorable men), and edeb (good behavior; politeness), alongside their opposites like hetk-i ‘ırz (violation of honor), ehl-i şakavât zümresinden (men of evil stratagems), as well as edebsiz (without breeding) in their reports regarding Kara Feyzi’s network but usually to describe bandit leaders’ behavior in general and almost never in relation to the sexual violence that came with their much larger repertoire of crime. In contrast, in Bulgarian and Serbian sources chest/chast (honor) as well as obezchesten/obezčašćen (dishonored) appear in local sources that referred to Kara Feyzi’s network’s specific attacks on local communities and their excesses against Christian maidens (Nachev, Fermandjiev 1984: 239-240; Manolova-Nikolova, 1999), which suggests that while local communities were concerned with the honor of their womenfolk, this was neither the kind of honor nor part of the bigger picture that concerned imperial officials or the imperial center when it came to Kara Feyzi’s insurgency. Rather than getting caught up in the semantics of honor and related concepts, this essay builds on recent historiography that revisits honor as a discourse that imperial officials, subjects, warriors, irregulars, and bandits all invoked in everyday relations as well as crisis. As opposed to approaching honor as something

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confined to individuals and face-to-face relations in rural communities, this essay approaches honor as a collective and institutional discourse that reflects the world views and apprehensions of broader interpretative and moral communities (Taylor 2011: 309). As Leslie Peirce points out in her contribution to this edition, honor and its constituent components such as shame, reputation, loyalty, fairness, honesty, and probity are relational concepts in that it takes communities to bestow or deny them to social actors. Indeed, this paper is concerned with these larger, trans-regional communities while being careful not to reify honor as something that can be harnessed by the state or one particular group. 5 It argues that honor and its relational components provide a flexible framework to study the ways in which sundry communities coped with endemic violence and multiple centers of power wielding (il)legitimate force in late Ottoman society. The concepts of honor embedded or implied in the narratives that will be discussed below reveal how different social groups made claims, competed for limited resources and status, negotiated what was right and wrong, and forged conflicting partnerships and allegiances with one another—however transient—for common pursuits. Rather than emphasizing honor as the mechanism of social organization in the absence of the reaches of the modern state, this essay illuminates the ways in which the discourse of honor (and its relational components) mediated the integration of individuals, groups, and local communities into much larger entities such as trans-regional networks and the structures of the state, since different manifestations of the state were ubiquitous in all of the disparate encounters reconstructed below.7 As it will be argued, the reliance of imperial governance on the trans-regional networks of violence to police and defend society resulted in a precarious intimacy that conventionalized the unconventional, insubordinate behavior of vast echelons of Ottoman society, making violent behavior a marker of prestige and masculinity.

The Trope of Unemployment and Trans-Regional Networks of Violence

6 Parts of Deli Mustafa’s self-narrative in which he recalls his adventures in the Morea during the Greek Revolution (1821-1829) read like “rites of passage” into manhood in which a young warrior proudly boasts of beheading infidel (kâfir) insurgents, pillaging their communities, and enslaving their womenfolk—acts that would have won him the respect of his comrades, father (who accompanied him throughout his travels), commanders, and other target audiences of his narrative.8 Deli Mustafa emphasizes extreme forms of ritualistic violence and vengeance that he claims he visited onto his Christian adversaries, and he also boasts of daring risks he took whilst skillfully avoiding the same type of humiliation that he claims his cunning Greek adversaries sought to inscribe upon him and the Muslim community in general.

7 Throughout his account of his earlier journeys in Anatolia where he fought against rebellious paşas, bandits, or Kurdish tribes, however, Deli Mustafa makes only vague references to similar types of violence that his larger network wielded upon fellow Muslims. This suggests that the author understood the Greek Revolution to be a legitimate context for him to describe the full repertoire of the ritualistic violence and pillaging that men like him visited upon Ottoman society as a whole less discriminately. A careful reading of Deli Mustafa’s account reveals the narrator’s greater concerns with

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tensions and animosities within the Muslim community itself; the Greek Revolution merely permitted him to outline the building blocks of his masculine aesthetic with impunity. In particular, his account points to the larger struggles itinerate military forces had with their Muslim commanders as well as other ranks of soldiery like the Janissaries. It is in these descriptions running the gamut of trust, deception, and multiple, conflicting loyalties that marked relations among Muslim paramilitary networks, imperial commanders, and sundry local communities that one sees how the discourse of honor was crucial in governing social relations across communities and social groups. 8 Narratives like this combined with Ottoman archival sources give us insight into how men like Deli Mustafa and Kara Feyzi positioned themselves in relation to their immediate divisions or bands, larger, trans-regional networks, as well as the state. In this sense, Deli Mustafa’s self-narrative resembles the narratives of police officials that Noemi Levy-Aksu focuses on in her contribution to this collection of essays in that honor was a central value around which the narrator promoted himself as well as his larger network of itinerate warriors who became the backbone of the Ottoman war machine and internal policing mechanisms yet were denied the professional status, pay, and dignity of traditional military bodies such as the Janissaries. It is in this context that one should understand Deli Mustafa’s rhetoric of inclusion and exclusion on moral grounds, for he constantly juxtaposes himself and his delî comrades as honorable, loyal men concerned with protecting and upholding the faith and state to the ruthless stratagems of dishonorable Janissaries and imperial commanders who were all out for their own interests. 9 For instance, in an anecdote from his campaigns during the Greek Revolution, Deli Mustafa describes how he and his companions (along with dozens of female Greek captives they had acquired earlier) came upon insurgents near Kûmiye (Kymi, on the island of Euboea). After defeating and decapitating some of them, Mustafa and his men proceeded back to their camp with female slaves, the heads of insurgents, as well as what he claims were five thousand of their sheep. However, when they came upon Janissaries on the road, things immediately went awry when an enraged Janissary ağa (leader)who had his eyes on their loot complained that irregulars like the narrator were moving in on places ahead of the Janissaries and claiming first dibs on the Greek booty. Deli Mustafa adds that the ağa ordered his men to hold up Deli Mustafa and his comrades at gunpoint and confiscate their booty. In addition to stealing all of his female captives, decapitated Greek heads, and animals, Deli Mustafa also laments that the Janissaries robbed him of his horse, rendering him a simple foot soldier (...hemân piyâde kaldım; Ms. Or. 1551, 113a).9 10 Deli Mustafa recalls another episode in which Janissaries directly sullied his and his companions’ honor, when they caught them conversing with Greek insurgents. After mocking Mustafa and his comrades by saying they feared infidels and were not worthy of the sultan’s bread, one of Mustafa’s insulted companions allegedly charged against the insurgents’ trench on a horse unarmed, and as a result, was immediately shot dead off his horse: “...kâfirden korkaruz dimişler idi ve padişah etmeği (sic. ekmeği) sizlere harâmdır dimişler idi...,” (ibid.: 72a-72b). Thus, Deli Mustafa’s encounters with menacing Janissaries were not only just as dangerous as those with Greek insurgents, but they also speak to the ubiquitous problem non-salaried irregulars faced: though the imperial war machine relied on these men to police and defend the Empire, imperial elites and

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rival Janissaries denied these men professional status and respect, in addition to symbolic and material benefits they felt they were entitled to. The reader of Deli Mustafa’s text can surmise that one’s honor was something which men defended at all costs. 11 What can be discerned from Deli Mustafa’s tales of his exploits as well as bad luck in keeping his booty is that they were inherently connected to his commanders’ running vast trading networks of booty, slaves, and even body parts that they accumulated from different ranks of soldiery to sell to other networks in order to line their own pockets.10 Men like Deli Mustafa could not possibly deal with the logistics of such a vast enterprise and were thus the “wholesalers” that fed this much larger, lucrative economy. But being on the ground as a “wholesaler” was marked by brutal competition among the different ranks of Muslim soldiery, and it is in this context that one must consider the overall meaning of Deli Mustafa’s narration of his heroics. 12 Among the hardships that Deli Mustafa laments the most, however, unemployment on account of treacherous commanders who frequently abandoned him and his companions features most in the text. This comes out most clearly in his account of travels in Anatolia where irregulars did not have license to pillage local communities to make a living as freely they did in the Morea. The narrator’s discussion of this issue hints at how irregular forces understood their position as both contested commodities in inter-elite imperial intrigues and victims of the same whose suffering justified their collectively contentious ways. For instance, the narrator once explains that he and entire communities of his comrades were left unemployed (“kapusuz,” i.e., without a patron) on account of their commanders’ deceit. They were, therefore, forced to roam eastern and central Anatolia “from this village to that village” (bu köyde şu köyde) to get by (Ms. Or. 1551, 13a). The trope of unemployment duplicitously imposed upon them became an important bond between not only Deli Mustafa and his immediate companions in his division but also a vast community of Muslim itinerate warrior and bandit orders that spoke the same language of oppression across the entire Empire. 13 On this note, Deli Mustafa also reflects upon what he considered the “legitimate” as opposed to “illegitimate” plundering of local communities and blurry boundaries between banditry and the necessity of survival. He distinguishes between elite officials labeled “outlaws” (fermânlı, those whose recalcitrance elicited an imperial edict against them) versus local, common “robbers” (harâmî, those engaged in unlawful activity) whom they encountered in skirmishes and battles throughout Anatolia. However, when it came to his and his companions’ “roaming” Anatolia for sustenance, he is completely mum regarding what specific forms of coercion they exerted to expropriate food and resources from local populations. His account suggests that the itinerate soldiers’ “roaming” without patrons became sort of an “accepted” practice since their superiors clearly realized that their bamboozling their men out of pay would result in their oppressing the local populations. 14 Deli Mustafa’s recurrent talk of unemployment on account of being treated dishonorably by elites, a feature also implicit in the corpus of sources revolving around Kara Feyzi’s insurgency, was of a special order: it was a key element in the discourse of a military laborer ethos, and as such, should be interpreted ideologically rather than literally. For instance, in his work on the sheep rustling and violence of highland pastoral communities in twentieth-century Crete, Michael Herzfeld points out how Cretan shepherds constantly manipulated tensions between local (village and Cretan)

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and national ethics in their everyday discourse, a rhetoric of self-justification balanced against self-recognition, through evoking an “ideology of hunger.” Cretan highlander communities were well aware that their activities invoked official disapproval and punitive action. But they also maintained that animal theft was a particular feature of a klepht (i.e., nineteenth-century Greek bandit/freedom-fighter) ethos that was fashioned in Greek national narratives as the single-most important factor that helped undermine Turkish domination in the nineteenth century. In this sense, their cheerful insubordination against state laws and authority emphasizes their identity through the poetics of theft and narration of their community as mountain dwellers whose culture was crucial for establishing the Greek nation and placed them beyond the reproach of government authorities (Herzfeld 1985: 21). Indeed, what is striking is how this masculine ethos still discernible in Cretan communities in the twentieth-century was predicated upon appropriating the memory of ambiguous historical groups (i.e., klephts) that functioned very much like their Muslim counterparts that Deli Mustafa represented. 15 Whilst describing how he and thousands of irregulars were the victims of their superiors’ intrigue and abuse, however, Deli Mustafa also boasts about how the paramilitary contingents to which he belonged were savvy networks capable of dealing with adversity brought onto them by their superiors and taking full advantage of their position as “contested commodities.” Put simply, their strategy consisted of entertaining, soliciting, and accepting more advantageous employment propositions of rival factions, be they elite paşas or infamous “robbers.” Itinerate warriors hedged their bets by talking with individuals and groups at war with one another, and loyalties could shift at any given moment because imperial officials and bandit bosses alike depended on them for manpower.11 To everyone involved, these volatile exchanges were constitutive of customary, acceptable behavior, which again highlights the precarious intimacy of governance and crime during this period of Ottoman history. For instance, while he and his companions lay under siege in Ardanuç castle under the patronage of a certain Baba Paşa stationed in nearby Erzurum, Deli Mustafa relates that one of their assailants, a local strongman named Kara Kadı began communicating with them and offered them clemency (bizlerere’y verüb) by giving them food, shelter, and presumably better pay in return for abandoning their positions at the castle. Deli Mustafa casually notes that he and his companions accepted the overtures of their assailant and moves on, but shortly afterwards he points out that Baba Paşa did in fact abandon him and 15,000 other irregulars (Schmidt 2002: 192). This episode points to the fact that these types of soldiery clearly understood their position as men whose skills were very marketable in Ottoman society.12 This is what put them in a position to negotiate better deals, salaries, and access to plunder for themselves if need be, thus prompting one to take the narrator’s recurring trope of victimhood and unemployment with a grain of salt. 16 The dynamics Deli Mustafa conveys as common survival tactics for vast groups of military laborers compares well with similar dynamics that marked the career of Kara Feyzi a couple of decades earlier on the other side of the Empire in northern Rumeli. For example, in October 1795 the Protector of Belgrade (belgrad muhâfızı) reported that the retinue of Kara Feyzi was pillaging communities on his path to take the city in conjunction with rebellious Janissaries exiled from the region because their plundering of the local population was no longer condoned by the Ottoman government after

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1791-92 when peace with the Habsburgs and Russians was made (B.O.A. HH 2402C). But what stands out in the paşa’s correspondence is the fluid nature of the boundaries between his own military forces and Kara Feyzi’s network, betraying the perpetual challenge officials faced in their efforts to recruit reliable forces to fight Kara Feyzi’s insurgency. In this case El-Hac Mustafa Paşa voices his concern that his sekbân troops (irregulars) defending Belgrade were unreliable because Kara Feyzi’s agents were among their ranks persuading them to join their network. However, the paşa’s correspondence concomitantly betrays that he withheld the pay of his men and refused to allow them to return to their homes when their contracts ended in order to prevent them from joining the bandits. These imperial policies would only back-fire time and time again and encourage his various types of auxiliary soldiery to join Kara Feyzi’s bands.13 Similar to the Kara Kadı option that Deli Mustafa alludes to, Mustafa Paşa’s comments underline Kara Feyzi’s recurrent contact and negotiations with low-ranking warriors who were supposed to protect local communities from him but elected to join him either because of the ill-treatment of their superiors or because Kara Feyzi’s enterprise promised them a more lucrative deal or access to plunder. 17 Rather than trying to confirm or negate the truth of the claims of someone like Deli Mustafa or those officials reporting on Kara Feyzi who were often in cahoots with him, one can instead view the idiom of “unemployment” or “deceit” as an “ideological” tool- box shared by irregular soldiery that could help explain away individual as well as collective insubordination and violence. As Herzfeld points out with regard to highland shepherds in modern Crete, the poetic effect of introducing a narrative with allusions to hunger or some other conventionalized form of deprivation to explain violent behavior is precisely to identify the warrior’s condition with that of larger society and to divert attention on the manly qualities of the act itself (Herzfeld 1985: 22). Men like Deli Mustafa are not simply lying when they talk about their deprivations. It is this imbalance between the limited power and financial means of what appear to be whimsical paşas and their dependence on irregulars like Mustafa to carry out their commissions that engenders the symbolism of unemployment. As Herzfeld suggests, perhaps a better word would be “dissatisfaction”—the dissatisfaction that both creates insubordination and becomes its most characteristic expression (id., ibid.). To military laborers, one of the true marks of manhood was the ability to hold one’s head high in the face of adversity and repression that they came to expect from their commanders. This entails a high level of awareness of the implications of official rhetoric and an ability to mock and parody it both on the part of the irregulars and their superiors who very well knew that the former would prey upon subjects once they were tricked out of their pay. 18 This rhetoric of victimhood and deprivation, however, should not be interpreted in terms of class or social oppositions, strategies of resistance, or as the so-called “weapons of the weak,” because even though he carefully distances himself from outright “rebellious behavior” that he attributes only to rebel paşas (fermânlı) and common criminals (harâmî), Deli Mustafa does hint that the vast networks of irregulars to which he belonged could be very ruthless—and very organized—in their dealings with imperial officials who double-crossed them.14 For instance, sometime in 1816 the aforementioned Baba Paşa contracted Deli Mustafa and his companions to travel to the Georgian borderland in the retinues of a certain Yegan Paşa and bölükbaşı (leader of irregular forces) Mahmud Kiran to lay siege to the fortress of Ahıska occupied by a paşa

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who was declared an outlaw by Istanbul (Schmidt 2002: 189-191).15 After completing this mission, the narrator reports that while they were awaiting further orders from their commander, they obtained news from informants that the inhabitants of the region had lodged complaints against Baba Paşa and his men to the sultan because his forces had allegedly deflowered no less than 500 local girls and decapitated several thousand Ahıskans in the process of fighting the aforementioned rebellious paşa. Noteworthy is how Deli Mustafa is careful to distance this violence—the very same ritualistic and sexual violence he hinted at in the Greek context—from himself and attribute it only to other divisions of Baba Paşa’s forces. 19 But as a consequence of this intelligence and new developments, the author informs his audience that Baba Paşa was dismissed and ordered to assume a new post in Diyarbakir, which prompted Deli Mustafa and presumably thousands of other irregulars to rush back to Erzurum in order to collect their pay before the paşa skipped town for his new post. Baba Paşa, however, managed to weasel his way out of Erzurum without paying his men, and this prompted Deli Mustafa’s bölükbaşı Mahmud Kıran and others whom the narrator strategically labels as “mischievous soldiers” to assault Baba Paşa’s remaining hârem and possessions in Erzurum. Even though he again distances himself from the violence his comrades visited upon Baba Paşa’s intimate relations/kin, Deli Mustafa nevertheless betrays the fact that he and his companions later joined forces with Mahmud Kiran after the Baba Paşa hârem incident (Schmidt 2002: 193-194). Thus, one can surmise that it was his consistent concern for portraying himself as an honorable warrior that dictated his circumspection. In other instances not involving Muslim officials’ womenfolk, however, Deli Mustafa is much more explicit about his and his comrades’ marching against commanders who conned them out of their pay and physically threatening them, thus pointing to how pacts of honor gone awry could backfire for the powerful as well as subordinate at any given moment.16 20 This reported attack on the paşa’s hârem suggests that just like the Greek rebels Ottoman imperial elites could also be subject to the ultimate disgrace of having their womenfolk dishonored by Ottoman irregulars if they double-crossed the wrong men. As everyone involved in such an encounter understood, to harm, abuse, or abduct an enemy or his dependents—with the unstated presumption of using them for sex or slavery—was to level the greatest assault on his political honor: the violation of his household became symbolic of his failure to defend his domain and his dependents. As Leslie Peirce points out for earlier periods, the profit derived from abduction was more than symbolic. While taking captive bodies could be specifically aimed at inflicting dishonor, abduction typically accompanied other forms of theft and usurpation: part of the mystique of abduction and the fear it provoked was the lucrative violence that surrounded it (Peirce 2011: 312-3). In fact, Peirce argues that the “cult” of royal abduction intersected with the very self-fashioning of the Ottoman palace itself: as long as the Empire remained successful in conquering new territories and was led by warrior sultans of legendary prowess, the cult of abduction was a “positive force” for the honor and reputation of the Ottoman sultanate. However, it gradually turned into an act that threatened the state’s authority late in the sixteenth century once the imperial armies were no longer able to conquer new territories and politically ambiguous strongmen within society targeted the sultan’s subjects and used abduction as an assertion of honor, power, and valor against the sultan’s vision of order (Peirce 2011: 311-8).

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Precarious Intimacy: Conflicting Loyalties, Deception, and “Licit” Practice

21 Studying the sources documenting Kara Feyzi’s long insurgency reveals that in addition to recruiting and coercing common Muslims and Christians into joining his network, he would also attract some of the most eminent imperial officials who hailed not only from Rumeli or Istanbul but also from far away regions across the Empire into joining his plundering confederacy. Indeed, here—in addition to their very different audiences —lies the fundamental difference between Deli Mustafa’s narrative and the larger corpus of correspondence about Kara Feyzi. Nevertheless, some important congruencies are discernible. The former’s narrative blames treacherous paşas who abandoned Deli Mustafa and his comrades for their having to plunder subjects to make a living. With this narrative device he probably not only ingratiated himself to like- minded audiences of irregular soldiers sitting around campfires listening to his stories but also helped them collectively explain their contentious ways. Similarly, the larger corpus of sources written about Kara Feyzi by different actors reveals common strategies in how imperial elites who became embroiled in his lucrative enterprise came to explain to more august audiences, the sultan and Imperial Council, their own comprising behavior and symbiotic relations with Kara Feyzi. Inevitably, imperial grandees resorted to abduction tropes, claiming that they were abducted by evil men (erbâb-ı ser‘) like Kara Feyzi, “seduced” by these tricksters’ (hîle-kâr) power and promises, and then forced to terrorize and plunder the sultan’s subjects against their will.

22 This section will therefore discuss how imperial elites involved in the Kara Feyzi saga gradually went from feeling it incumbent upon themselves to at least maintain a semblance of protecting and acting honorably vis-à-vis Ottoman subjects in their interactions with bandit networks to no longer having to keep up such appearances as Kara Feyzi’s insurgency expanded in scope over the years. In the early years of Kara Feyzi’s insurgency, imperial and local elites portrayed their respective retinues and collective behavior as bound by honor, probity, as well as fidelity to the faith and state. However, they would ultimately come to participate consistently and openly in this network’s lucrative enterprise with little damage to their reputations and careers. They pursued their own agendas such as building powerful military retinues comprised of the very bandits they were supposed to repel in order to exhort more resources from both local communities and the imperial center as well as ensure that the retinues of other powerful figures did not threaten their interests. The fact that Kara Feyzi could forge increasingly intimate ties with the Empire’s most powerful elites suggests that recalcitrant behavior became customary for many different groups of Ottoman society, high and low. For their own part, elite officials would consistently explain such behavior to the sultanate by employing abduction narratives similar to Deli Mustafa’s unemployment trope in that they consistently served the same exculpatory function for their collective behavior. This section will discuss how different groups in society used the discourse of honor and its relational components to mediate social relations and negotiate status with surprising levels of parity. As I argue, this stemmed from officials’ precarious dependency upon and intimacy with networks of violence like Kara Feyzi’s to police and defend the Empire.

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23 Kara Feyzi’s rapid ascension onto the imperial stage as a broker of power on an imperial scale came around 1797-8, after years of successfully plundering large parts of Rumeli from Ottoman Serbia in the west to the very gates of Istanbul in the east. In fact, his interactions with high-ranking officials charged with the contradictory tasks of repelling and co-opting him and his vast network became increasingly intimate after an incident that took place in Filibe in September 1797.The incident brought the Empire’s most prominent ministers, the Governor of Rumeli, Mustafa Paşa, and Governor of Anatolia, Seyyid Ali Paşa, into a head-on clash over the strategy regarding how the imperial government should best deal with Kara Feyzi’s menace—by cooptation or outright extermination. While Mustafa Paşa advocated the former approach and at that very moment was negotiating with Kara Feyzi his cooptation into his retinue, his counterpart insisted upon the latter, and attacked Kara Feyzi’s demobilized band in the middle of negotiations. In a furious exchange of dispatches between the vezîrs and the sultan over this incident the two paşas attacked each other’s character, loyalty to the state and faith, and ability to deal with the endemic problem of banditry in the Empire. 24 Though I deal with this encounter and its consequences at length elsewhere, here I would like to explore the role of honor in mediating one’s standing in imperial politics and how it was harnessed by these respective actors. Mustafa Paşa was well aware of Kara Feyzi’s penchant for reneging on the promises he made to imperial officials in the past.17 However, in light of this scandal and the threat Seyyid ‘Ali Paşa posed to his reputation both locally and in Istanbul, portraying Kara Feyzi and his companions as trustworthy men served his goal of undermining his opponent. Kara Feyzi and his men were described as sincerely pleading for mercy and on the verge of being successfully rehabilitated as dependable servants (bende) who would conduct themselves henceforth with honor and decorum in the paşa’s administration (“...müstâfır olup kendü ‘ırz ü edebleriyle dâ’ire-yi hâlisânemizde edâ-yı hidmet...”). According to his testimony, it was Seyyid ‘Ali Paşa and his Anatolian troops’ cowardly, unsanctioned violence that fumbled what would have been Mustafa Paşa’s successful cooptation of this notorious network. 25 In conjunction with trying to portray Kara Feyzi and his companions as honorable victims in this affair to suit his own agenda, Mustafa Paşa also conveys the shame (haclet-i ‘azîm) that Seyyid ‘Ali Paşa’s intervention into local affairs and unauthorized use of force brought to his own reputation in Rumeli. The inhabitants of the city had heard that the followers of Kara Feyzi and his companions were actually pardoned, given amnesty, and even employed by the Governor of Rumeli, yet the Governor of Anatolia attacked these men along with innocent bystanders regardless, rendering Mustafa Paşa’s word of honor void. Mustafa Paşa even cites the alleged speech of Kara Feyzi himself to comment on Seyyid ‘Ali Paşa’s honor, pointing out how the latter’s soldiers cravenly attacked wounded men who could not defend themselves and then proceeded to rob, slaughter, and burn down the homes of local inhabitants in the process, thus conveying how the local community felt that they endured collateral damage as a result of what appeared a breach of honor. 26 For his own part, Seyyid ‘Ali Paşa expressed his great shame at being reproached by the sultan and ordered to return back to Anatolia without fulfilling his exclusive commission (together with an army of 10,000 men) of destroying Kara Feyzi—all on account of his peer’s specious reports about his conduct. Ali Paşa argued that Mustafa

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Paşa was both unable to control these bandits and that his administration was in cahoots with them. Both ministers’ careers, nevertheless, soon declined and ended fatally because of their dealings with Kara Feyzi’s larger networks, whereas, Kara Feyzi and his companions lived and plundered on having gained new visibility through this incident and profited from the imperial army’s evacuation from Rumeli to meet the challenge of Napoleon’s army in Egypt in the summer of 1798.18 27 As this incident suggests, in the early years of Kara Feyzi’s insurgency, vezîrs were concerned with upholding their reputations in their constituent retinues and surrounding communities since they could be subject to public shame and disgrace for failing to uphold their words of honor, even when they were given to high profile bandit leaders. In contrast, bandit leaders like Kara Feyzi were immune to this shame and disgrace and seemed only to boost their reputations by breaking their promises and consistently duping local and imperial officials. In this sense, one can see not only how different groups were held to different criteria revolving around conflicting notions of honorable behavior based on class and status but also how disparate groups from below could manipulate elites into compromising situations whilst legitimating their own contentious ways (Stewart 2001). On dozens of occasions Kara Feyzi broke promises, feigned his willingness to betray companions, and even had his men continue to pillage an area so that he could have more leverage when negotiating with local leaders, yet the local populace consistently cooperated with him and his men because of the coercive power that his organization wielded over local society.19 28 What would become most alarming from the perspective of Istanbul, however, is that very soon after the Filibe scandal other high-ranking officials began to maraud and pillage Rumeli openly alongside Kara Feyzi’s network thereby eliminating the need to maintain a semblance of acting honorably vis-à-vis the sultan’s vision of order and subjects. On 23 June 1799, for example, a report reached Istanbul that another vezîr commissioned to destroy Kara Feyzi, the Governor of Adana Hüseyin Paşa, had no scruples about openly joining Kara Feyzi’s network in pillaging and slaughtering communities between the cities of Edirne and Kırca‘ali. He apparently decided on this course of action upon hearing news that he would have to return to Anatolia because of his retinue’s ineffectiveness in fighting Kara Feyzi’s network (HH 2930). According to the report, in his negotiations with the Porte Hüseyin Paşa—like Seyyid ‘Ali Paşa and others after him—demanded that rather than being ordered back to the Arab provinces disgraced and empty-handed, he should be promoted to the position of the Governor of Rumeli (ibid.). It appears from the records that Ottoman elites could pursue the tactics of joining the bandits with little damage to their track record in Istanbul, thus sending out the message to all groups of society that crime did, indeed, pay very well.20 29 One of the central exculpatory devices in the rehabilitation negotiations between the renegade vezîr and the central government in Istanbul was the hackneyed abduction narrative in which the vezîrs sought to explain to the sultan their choice of openly terrorizing Ottoman subjects alongside Kara Feyzi. For instance, another fallen vezîr, Koşancalı Halil Paşa, forged a long relationship with Kara Feyzi’s network, pillaging for years regions throughout Rumeli stretching from northern Serbia along the Danube where they initially met to Greece and even the outskirts of Istanbul in the southeast by 1803. Among a number of sources that address Kara Feyzi and Koşancalı’s relationship, a couple of related documents written in the winter of 1801 are particularly noteworthy. The first one dated 20 January 1801 was a dispatch that the

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Edirne Bostancıbaşı sent to Tayyar Mahmud Paşa, the Governor of Trabzon, who was another Anatolian vezîr commissioned to come to southern Rumeli to disband and destroy Kara Feyzi’s network (HH 2436). The official reports that though Kara Feyzi and his companion Kara Mustafa were still devastating the Filibe region, the two were simultaneously sending in pleas for amnesty as well as the permission to remain there permanently in exchange for promising to reform their dishonorable ways (ibid.). The bostancıbaşı adds, however, that he indicated to them that in order to receive pardon, this time they would have to kill their high-ranking companion Koşancalı Halil Paşa themselves and personally deliver his “wretched head” to him (ibid.). 30 Another 9 February 1801 dispatch written by the same official, however, reports that in a separate interview Halil Paşa had a very different story to tell about his companions: he claimed that he was “wounded with fear for his life” because of the lying and slander of these malicious men (...erbâb-ı garaz ifk ve iftirâsından nâşî cânımın havfından mecrûh olduğum...) (HH 3388C). He asserts that he was “taken captive” (girif-târ) by these men and forced to serve deep among their ranks while he was still a vezîr of the Sublime Porte and that faced with such a helpless state of abandonment he was prevented from making amends for his previous string of crimes in Belgrade and forced to roam together with these bandits throughout Rumeli against his better judgment. According to the author of this report, Halil Paşa even pledged to betray Kara Feyzi and his companions if Tayyar Paşa could only trick them into leaving with him to Anatolia under his employ so that they could set up an ambush, but as was the case with many other similar stratagems that involved duping Kara Feyzi, such a plan never materialized.21 Being tricked by Kara Feyzi, whom officials often labeled a trickster, became a chronically viable excuse for their compromising behavior.22

Conclusion

31 A common feature of the interactions of different groups discussed in this essay is that though they were of varying social status, all of them were trying to fashion themselves as honorable men in dishonorable times. The manipulation of the discourse of honor and its relational components—shame, reputation, loyalty, and probity—governed how powerful groups capable of wielding brutal force with impunity interacted with one another in Ottoman society. This paper also argued that in tumultuous times that coincided with momentous historical events (e.g., the combined effects of widespread disorder due to chronic inter-imperial wars, Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, or the Greek Revolution), the perception of what constituted honorable behavior and decorum changed—again pointing to the danger of imagining honor as a timeless discourse and social structure.

32 It was the flexible, ambiguous discourse of honor that helped mediate relations in lieu of Islamic (shari‘a) or sultanic (kanûn) law whose prescriptive injunctions and jurisdictions were not conceived to combat large scale paramilitary/bandit networks that operated as trans-regional organizations that preyed upon and disciplined Ottoman society.23 No local judge and his juridical tool-box could punish such large organizations. It was the proscriptive, fluid manner of custom and honor that dictated how different centers of power interacted with one another as well as local communities. Herein lay the contradictions of the state’s precarious relationship with trans-regional networks of violence to police and defend its society. The state armed

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and depended on these groups to fight its wars and man its policing apparatuses in the retinues of governors and other officials, and yet, it tacitly acknowledged that a majority of these high-ranking officials institutionalized deceiving and mistreating these same men when it came to paying and provisioning for them. The imperial center, therefore, naturally found itself in a compromised position vis-à-vis these cheap but lethal military organizations that could prey upon and terrorize Ottoman subjects and officials alike for sustenance and leverage. Deli Mustafa’s self-narrative sheds light on how individual members of these vast paramilitary orders fashioned themselves and their behavior vis-à-vis other groups of society; however, the corpus of sources written about Kara Feyzi provides us with a much larger interpretative community that integrates smaller voices like Mustafa’s or local administrators’ writing about Kara Feyzi together with the voices of the most powerful men in the Empire. 33 What these combined encounters point to is how ubiquitous the state was in the politics of honor on the ground. In their discussions of twentieth-century communities in the Mediterranean region anthropologists stressed that honor was a particular mode of communal interaction in the absence of moderating state institutions. Indeed, one of the most common criticisms of twentieth-century scholarship on the anthropology of honor and shame is that they were values mostly of country bumpkins living in rural, isolated mountain communities, and therefore, not representative of a so-called unity that anthropologists used by framing honor as a common denominator for the entire Mediterranean region. Case studies presented throughout this paper, however, all straddle the rural and urban divide and show how the discourse of honor was part of a trans-regional, customary forum in which all groups had to participate to negotiate material and symbolic resources. 34 Recently, historians of the early-modern Ottoman and Venetian Empires working on misogyny and abduction have reinserted the state into the discussion of honor. It has been argued that the sexual economy that tainted their victims, kin, and community also threatened the ruler himself by subjecting him to larger complaints about the integrity and legitimacy of imperial rule in general, and thus, concomitantly tainted his honor. For instance, Başak Tuğ’s contribution to this journal issue points to how specific types of eighteenth-century sources such as complaint registers (şikâyet defterleri) verify how men and women themselves were adept at manipulating notions of dishonor (hetk-i ‘ırz) committed against womenfolk by local strongmen to persuade the central government to move against men that threatened their common interests. However, in the large corpus of sources24 written about Kara Feyzi that demanded the immediate attention of the imperial council and the sultan, violence against and the abduction of women were not the primary concerns of males high and low writing about Kara Feyzi’s operation. Rather, these were gendered documents that reveal men across the social spectrum: vociferously defending their reputations, loyalty, and integrity whilst slandering those of others; staunchly fighting for vast material resources, weapons, commodities, and men; and insolently explaining away their compromising behavior with common tropes and phrases. In other words, although many of the men discussed in this essay were the usual culprits of misogyny, it is rather the awesome repertoire of crime and violence that accompanied sexual violence that reveals how honor and its relational components really mediated social relations among disparate groups of powerful men and different centers of power that dominated Ottoman society. The discourse of honor informed meso-level transactions

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that mediated how material and symbolic resources were distributed in a society in which most groups were tied to or affected by larger, trans-regional networks and their markets that bolstered what was still a sprawling empire. The ubiquity of these transactions questions the utility of talking about honor and shame as values that are pertinent only to peripheries and borderlands of empires or nation-states, since both Deli Mustafa as well as Kara Feyzi’s stories point to how networks of violence moved throughout the Ottoman realm and exerted veritable power and influence whether they roamed near Istanbul, eastern Anatolia, or the Balkans. 35 What Kara Feyzi and Deli Mustafa’s combined stories demonstrate is that the relationship between real power (i.e., the ability to wield extreme force) in the hands of sundry networks and the constant alternation between professed words of honor and allegiance versus deception among different groups of society caught in this zero-sum game point to how the resource of honor and its accompanying discourses had a “leveling affect” on social “class,” pedigree, and distinction that put actors of humble social origins on par with elite actors.25 In other words, the rapid social mobility in Ottoman society based on one’s ability to wield force points to how honor and its relational components was not a resource bound solely to social status and blood. Men like Deli Mustafa and Kara Feyzi were adept at manipulating officially recognized forms of protocol and decorum when they dealt with official representatives of the state. 36 While this essay focused on the moral communities of which Deli Mustafa, Kara Feyzi, and their interlocutors were part, at the same time it revealed the tensions of the heavily ideological, political, and historical relationships between their communities on the one hand and the state and other encompassing entities on the other in order to show how these groups did not understand Istanbul as their moral center (Herzfeld 1985: 20). Their strong sense of distinctive community shows that the concentric loyalties that marked Ottoman society did not represent secessionist threats to the state per se but offered alternative moral visions that justified, and valued, insubordinate behavior and inventive ways of disobedience (ibid.: xii-xvi). It is the precarious intimacy of the encounter of these groups and the fact that they were all held to conflicting standards of decorum and behavior yet placed on equal footing because of their ability to wield shocking violence on the one hand and the state’s reliance on this violence to police and defend its society on the other that insubordinate, unconventional behavior became conventionalized as a marker for manhood across social classes and organizations throughout Ottoman society.

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Manolova-Nikolova, Nadja; Zheleva, Penka (ed.) (1999), Летописни бележки от средна западна България, XVI-XX век [Notes in Chronicles from Central-Western Bulgaria], Sofia, Lik.

Nachev, Ventseslav; Fermandjiev, Nikola (ed.) (1984) Писахме да се знае: приписки и летописи [We Wrote to Let it Be Known: Marginalia and Chronicles], Sofia, Otechestvenija Front.

Peirce, Leslie (2011) ‘Abduction with (Dis)honor: Sovereigns, Brigands, and Heroes in the Ottoman World’, Journal of Early Modern History 15 (4), pp. 311-29, URI: http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1163/157006511X577005.

Peristiany, John G. (ed.) (1965), Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

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Pina-Cabral, João (1989) ‘The Mediterranean as a Category of Regional Comparison: A Critical View’, Current Anthropology 30 (3), pp. 399-406, URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2743537.

Pitt-Rivers, Julian (1977) The Fate of Shechem or the Politics of Sex: Essays in the Anthropology of the Mediterranean, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Sant Cassia, Paul (2006) ‘Better Occasional Murderers than Frequent Adulteries: Discourses on Banditry, Violence, and Sacrifice in the Mediterranean’, in Coronil, Fernando; Skurski, Julie (eds.), States of Violence, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, pp. 219-268.

Schmidt, Jan (2002) ‘The Adventures of an Ottoman Horseman: The Autobiography of Kabudlı Vasfî Efendi, 1800-1825’, in Schmidt, Jan, The Joys of Philology: Studies in Ottoman Literature, History and Orientalism (1500-1923) -I- Poetry, Historiography, Biography and Autobiography, Istanbul, İsis Yayınları, pp. 167-286.

Smiley, Will (2012) ‘When Peace is Made, You will Again be Free:’ Islamic and Treaty Law, Black Sea Conflict, and the Emergence of ‘Prisoners of War’ in the Ottoman Empire, 1739-1830, unpublished PhD. Dissertation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Queens’ College.

Stewart, Charles (2001) ‘Honor and Shame’, in Smelser, Neil J.; Baltes Paul B. (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavior Sciences, pp. 6904-6907, URI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ B0-08-043076-7/00884-6.

Taylor, Scott (2011) ‘Honor in the Early Modern Eastern Mediterranean – an Introduction’, Journal of Early modern History 15 (4), pp. 301-310, URI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/157006511X576998.

Tezcan, Baki (2010) The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

NOTES

1. Leiden University Library, Ms. Or. 1551. The manuscript is dated 22 zi’l-ka’de 1249 (April 2, 1834). It was translated into English and commented upon by J. Schmidt (2002). In this paper I will be referring both to Schmidt’s translation and to the actual manuscript. I have chosen to refer to the narrator as “Deli Mustafa” (which can also mean “Crazy Mustafa”) since he refers to himself as such in the narrative as opposed to using the his embellished name (El-Haccî Vasfî Efendi) signed at the beginning of the text. As I will discuss below, the authorship of this account is in question. 2. In terms of nomenclature for different types of military forces in Ottoman history, there were many types of “irregular,” mercenary-like forces such as delis, sarıca, levend, sekbân, etc. that the Ottomans used in warfare. For more on these types of forces, dubbed most recently as “military laborers” by V. Aksan because of the blurry boundaries among these different categories, see (Aksan 2007). 3. For more on Deli Mustafa’s narrative, see Esmer 2014b. 4. For more on Kara Feyzi and how his insurgency began as a “legal” punishment against rebellious Serbian and other Christian communities along the Danube, see Esmer 2014a. 5. For comparisons, see Campbell 1964; Peristiany 1965; Pitt-Rivers 1977. 6. See in particular Horden, Purcell 2000. 7. In this approach I am building on Herzfeld 1988. I am also in dialogue with Noemi Levy-Aksu’s contribution to this edition, which approaches honor as both an individual and collective value of inclusion and exclusion deeply connected to ideas about morality as well as loyalty to larger networks and the state.

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8. The authorship of this account is in question, as one can see from the mixing of genres in Deli Mustafa’s narrative as well as how he sometimes addresses his audience directly. These features suggest that he most likely dictated a series of oral accounts over time to a scribe of limited literacy, given the mistakes in syntax, spelling, and word choice. For more on Deli Mustafa’s narrative, the violence he describes in detail, and its overall meaning in Muslim interpretative communities at the time, see Esmer 2014b. 9. Being relegated to a simple foot soldier (piyâde) features as a common complaint or fear in Mustafa’s narrative when he describes horses being stolen or shot beneath him. It seems that the author took pride in being a deli as opposed to a foot soldier or volunteer (gönüllü), but at one point, he hints that his leader was a volunteer leader (gönüller ağası). 10. At one point after a battle, for instance, Deli Mustafa alludes to the fact that various groups of soldiery would bring all of their mutilated trophies, booty, as well as bound Christian slaves to line up before their superior officers to sell their loot and receive “bonuses” (Schmidt 2002: 261). 11. Ottomanists working on the Balkans around this period have also noticed similar types of negotiation strategies among itinerate warriors in the Balkans, groups often labeled collectively as “Albanian.” See Anscombe2006: 95-102. 12. Baki Tezcan has recently made the important point that one should see the increasing availability of mercenary-style irregular soldiery (e.g., sekbân) for inter- as well as intra-imperial warfare starting in the late sixteenth century as a direct result of imperial fiscal policies and the creation of a single currency zone (i.e., the “akçe zone”) that united markets from Yemen to Hungary. That being said, while Tezcan’s analysis portrays these irregulars as commodities to be bought and sold by Ottoman elites, this essay tries to study the other side of this picture, to show how this big mass of irregulars that scholars discuss were also very organized networks that were very adept at manipulating their status as “commodities” of the elite. See Tezcan 2010. 13. Ibid. For more on these recurring dynamics in the Kara Feyzi saga, see Esmer 2014a. 14. The fact that throughout the Kara Feyzi saga irregular and imperial soldiery consistently abandoned their commanders and joined lucrative bandit enterprises on the other side of the fortress walls only corroborates this. 15. According to Schmidt, Cevdet calls this bölükbaşı [division leader] Mahmud Tiran. See Ahmet Cevdet Paşa 1891-2, vol. X: 249. 16. For instance, near Erzincan another paşa, a certain Hafız ‘Ali Paşa, refused to pay Deli Mustafa and his fellow delis after their fulfilling their contracted services; thus, the narrator claims that they organized and marched against the paşa and were successful in extracting their pay through outright aggression. (Schmidt 2002: 198-199). In another instance, Mustafa notes that he had another quarrel (nizâ’ edüb) with a paşa on the Persian frontier in skirmishes with Persian troops. Once the paşa cut off their monthly allowance, the irregulars were the ones who abandoned him at Kars and left for Sivas. (Ibid.: 207). 17. For more on sincerity, probity, and imperial versus bandit strategies at the negotiation table, see Esmer 2014a. 18. For more on the fates of these vezîrs in contrast to Kara Feyzi, see Esmer 2014a. 19. For more on Kara Feyzi and his network’s surveillance, coercion, and access to vast amounts of information that gave his organization pre-emptive striking abilities, see Esmer 2014a. 20. Apparently, Hüseyin Paşa could act so boldly without any damage to his record, because he was soon afterwards appointed to combat Napoleon’s forces in Egypt. See HH 2930. 21. Ibid. Noteworthy, is that the aforementioned Mustafa Paşa also convinced the sultan to order Seyyid ‘Ali Paşa to take Kara Feyzi and his retinue back to Anatolia; however, Kara Feyzi and his companions refused to fall for this trick. 22. For more examples of other vezîrs’ and paşas’ making such claims, see Esmer 2014a.

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23. For more on the limits of law in dealing with large-scale crime, see Başak Tuğ’s contribution in this EJTS issue. 24. For example, hatt-ı hümâyûn, cevdet dahiliye, cevdet ‘adliye, mühimme defterleri, etc. but not sicil defterleri (court records) or şikâyet defterleri. 25. Like Peristiany, Pitt-Rivers, and Campbell writing before her, Abu-Lughod (1986) also saw blood and pedigree as critical to a person’s honor and worth. Blood, she argued, is the authenticator of origin or pedigree and as such is crucial to Bedouin identity, and ‘asl, ancestry or nobility, is a crucial component in the “honor code.” In the terms usually translated as honor, i.e., sharaf (şerif in Turkish), are implied a cluster of values that a morally excellent man is likely to have inherited: generosity, honesty, sincerity, keeping one’s world of honor and loyalty to friends and family. In contrast, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s work on honor and social relations questions such oppositions. See (Horden, Purcell 2000).

ABSTRACTS

This essay sets up a dialogue between the self-narrative of an irregular cavalryman (deli) Deli Mustafa that recounts the campaigns he took part in between 1801/2 and 1825 and the corpus of Ottoman archival sources written about Kara Feyzi, an irregular soldier (sekbân) and bandit leader who marshaled a successful, trans-regional organized crime network that pillaged Ottoman Rumeli from 1793 to 1823. It does so in order to tell a larger story about how imperial governance came to depend on wide-spread networks of violence for defending and policing the Empire but became imbricated in their criminal activities during this period of Ottoman history. Together, Kara Feyzi and Deli Mustafa’s stories shed light on much larger interpretative and moral communities forged upon the same kinds of “texts,” narrative strategies, group experiences, exchange of material and symbolic resources, or simply a concept like honor woven throughout the narratives discussed below. This essay builds on recent historiography that revisits honor as a discourse that imperial officials, subjects, warriors, irregulars, and bandits all invoked in everyday relations as well as crisis. Rather than emphasizing honor as the mechanism of social organization in the absence of the reaches of the modern state as it featured in twentieth-century anthropology of the Mediterranean, this essay illuminates the ways in which the discourse of honor (and its relational components) mediated the integration of individuals, groups, and local communities into much larger entities such as trans-regional networks and structures of the state. As it will be argued, the reliance of imperial governance on the trans-regional networks of violence to police and defend empire resulted in a precarious intimacy that conventionalized the unconventional, insubordinate behavior of vast echelons of Ottoman society, making violent behavior a marker of prestige and masculine aesthetic—indeed an enduring legacy of the Ottoman past from Serbia to Syria.

INDEX

Keywords: honor, Mediterranean, interpretative community, masculine ethos, Ottoman Empire, Balkans, Greek Revolution, self-narrative, ego-document, narrative strategies, irregulars, Kabudlı Vasfî Efendi, Kara Feyzi, imperial governance, networks of violence

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AUTHOR

TOLGA UĞUR ESMER

Assistant Professor, Central European University, Hungary Department of History

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An Honorable Break from Besa: Reorienting Violence in the Late Ottoman Mediterranean

Isa Blumi

Besa e shqiptarit si purteka e arit (An Albanian’s Honor is worth more than Gold)

Introduction: The Problems of Telling a Violent Story

1 Underlying any study wishing to account for fundamental changes in how societies function must be the quest to identify causes and effects of violence. Predictably, this has led to contradictory, if not ultimately confusing, narratives with as much left out of the story as imposed by the historian. What these contradictory stories ultimately suggest is that any attempt to study the animating factors leading to, and resulting from, violence in any specific moment will suffer from a fundamental flaw: The fact that a composite narrative misrepresents the reality of disparate and geographically scattered events. As such, any reference to bloodshed must account for the fact that any number of things can potentially contribute to different processes taking place at the same time (and even place), processes that cannot be neatly explained by reference to violence alone.

2 The following study invariably also suffers from this methodological weakness in that it too mobilizes a narrow selection of events/nonevents (at the expense of including others) in order to reinterpret the so-called origins and enduring legacies of violence in still understudied western Balkan areas during the 1800 to 1918 period. Among the underlying impediments to analyzing the disparate events identified as contributing to, for instance, the 1912-1913 Balkan Wars’ long-term consequences rests, in part, on a narrow focus on specific administrative zones—the mountainous borderlands of Kosova, Işkodra, Serbia, and Montenegro known here as Malësi—and their inhabitants, without fully engaging seemingly peripheral events beyond these locales. However, as we learn from looking at events in such settings more closely, the long assumed sources

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of violence within the Ottoman Balkans—a resilient local culture of resistance—proved to have important, often forgotten, implications. These implications both transformed Ottoman state practices and the competing imperial ambitions in the region.1 3 Evidence of violent exchange in even “isolated” borderland regions like Malësi may require a careful reinterpretation of what documented violence actually reflects at several layers of social organization and institutional interaction.2 In the end, violent moments that appeared to mark the collapse of Ottoman rule in the western Balkans, often seen in regional historiographies as an ascendency of local practices that in turn reflect primordial ethno-national associations or practices, need deeper inspection, not sweeping retrospective assertions.3 One perfect example of our need to excise carefully any undue anachronisms from our interpretations of violent events in the Balkans is how we treat events in the context of the establishment of an Albanian state in the post-Ottoman era. 4 To many scholars wishing to glean significance from enduring tropes about a Northern Albanian culture of violence—predicated on the honor-bound enforcement of local laws whose very documentation justifies scholarly presumptions of significance in the matters of day-to-day existence of peoples living in Malësi—the very existence of “tradition” constitutes validation for assuming linkage (Burda 2012). Earlier generations of social scientists had an equally utilitarian notion of culture and folklore, one that both neatly confined the object of study to a unit of analysis and enabled the observer to anticipate ways to influence these disparate constituencies in the affairs of state. For example, to agents of external powers—especially the Habsburgs and Britain —flirting with indigenous practices seemingly helped them offer insight into how to best manipulate the affairs of Northern Albanians.4 5 While local practices based on Albanian “honor codes” or besa may have played a role in helping forge an insurgency that at one point contributed to the destabilization of Ottoman rule in the region, I wish to suggest such cultural affinities cannot substitute for an explanation of why locals resorted to (or threatened) violence. Here, I offer at once a set of possible alternative ways to understanding the motivation behind certain policies vis-à-vis the region’s inhabitants and also a complication to what it is we assume is Albanian honor, a complication that aims to correct an indigenous sourced essentialism so many scholars mobilize to explain events in the western Balkans (Pula 2013). As such, this study looks into tensions around the regulation of honor codes in Albanian territories in order to undermine the authority of discourses of the “native”, both iterated from those speaking on behalf of said “native” and the operatives of state seeking to harness them. 6 Crucially, both sets of narratives are as much the manifestation of a product of policy and/or indigenous agency that seeks to harness local violence as they are a neat sociological variant useful for explaining community.5 In this respect, I am suggesting that observed tension in the archives frequently mentioned in historians’ depictions of events in the Ottoman Balkans may be but extensions of intricate domestic disputes that are themselves marked by gradations of possible violence as much as actual violence.6 By nuancing this reading of violence through a skeptical reevaluation of the utility of honor codes synonymous to those of the “highland peoples” of Northern Albania in the late Ottoman era (called Malësorë), I am hoping to initiate a new approach to monitoring social dynamics in the Ottoman Balkans. As such, this is not only an exploration of honor politics in an Ottoman context, but also an exercise in

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revisiting neglected cases of indigenous sources of change initiated by Albanian officers of state that are otherwise obscured in the literature by the violence of the First World War.

Methodological Issues: The Ottoman-Albanian Effendiyya Agent of State

7 There is an interesting tension in the way men linked to the generation of native-born state reformers orientated themselves toward their homelands in the Ottoman Balkans. Because of the disproportionate number of natives of the western Balkans region making up the cadre of Young Ottomans, many expected to help administer their often volatile homelands faced the awkward task of claiming authority on the basis of their direct association to a society that many Ottoman elites believed was in desperate need of state rule. As a result, many native Albanians became the main ideologues to justify the extension of state power into areas largely autonomous from Istanbul in the past, but they would do so evoking the very “racist” tropes that are assumed reserved for non-natives. Undoubtedly, these “self-hating” Albanians, Bulgarians, Greeks, and Vlachs would prove to be the most virulent advocates for the kind of “harsh love” in the Ottoman Balkans long associated with a particularistic European colonialism (Makdisi 2002).

8 The problem with studying Ottoman state expansion-as-reform is that there is always the danger of thinking of the effendiyya “class” implementing such policies as a monolith. To the contrary, there were internal divisions, factions, and ultimately rivalries that reflected the initial geographic, social class, and “ethnic” diversity of this bureaucracy. This diversity impacted how reforms were actually implemented. In fact, there is evidence that these reforms often treated as part of a generic “Tanzimat” or “modernization” era were not applied uniformly in the Balkans at all. Often the more lucrative projects and its big budgets went to the home districts of officials while the more authoritarian measures were dedicated to underrepresented areas deemed “savage” or “backward” in the documents.7 In this respect, reports promoting either neglect (what is the point of throwing money down the drain) or heavy investment (these subjects need greater state presence), reflect a local flavor that is sometimes lost to historians eager to explain Ottoman era reforms (İnalcık 1993). 9 In crucial ways, native-born bureaucrats, often hailing from southern Albanian regions known as Toskëri, administered each region, in each distinct instant, with different variations of reforms-as-state-building-tools. This suggests a manner of applying state power that was always mitigated by a combination of local conditions and personal connections to the communities slotted for reform. There was, in other words, a local and personal context to the way “modern reform” and its violence (or potential) was implemented as well as experienced. 10 As suggested throughout, one cannot help but read a quasi “colonialist” attitude in the correspondences of native-born bureaucrats discussing the affairs of their tumultuous homelands in the western Balkans while expanding Ottoman state authority there. In almost absolute ubiquity, when analyzing the conditions in the western Balkans, these native-born reformers put emphasis on the special role of the state in changing the region from being entrenched in old customs to becoming part of the modern world.

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11 Revealingly, these policy agendas were regularly iterated in almost racist tones, where “reform” in the provinces entailed “civilizing” local populations. While such attitudes have been already observed in the Ottoman story, it is in this case actually the “native- son” who used the racist colonial epistemology to justify “governing” his homeland as a hostile land in need of “civilizing” violence. As is often the case, the scholarship that conflated the violence of “savage” peoples disguises an ambivalent admiration, one generated by fear and seduction for the exotic.8 As such, the negative contrast so often evoked in scholarship on such “othering” is often reversed: in being based on a sense of personal and collective dignity, and by conferring the power of execution on the family or community rather than on a formalized punitive state apparatus, highland Albanian custom seems finally more capable than modern laws of guaranteeing justice and thus bringing order to regions seemingly out of control. In other words, native-born members of the Ottoman state apparatus were the greatest apologists for Ottoman bureaucratic expansionism in the western Balkans during the nineteenth century (Avlonyalı Ekrem Bey 2006). 12 While conflicts of interest may translate into a positive flow of government funds and jobs for many in the western Balkans, it could mean an imbalanced, unjustified use of negative government power for others. This incongruence is possible to identify, however, only if we disaggregate the bureaucracy, breaking apart the generic into more detailed units of observation. This requires distinguishing the native-born from the nonnative as well as going a step further and understanding that being from one village, kabile, or fis (Albanian for clan) and not the one from which a reformer came probably determined the quality of “reform” in one area or another. 13 In many ways, the literature is trapped by the formal categories used to understand events prior to World War I. Scholars of many disciplines, especially those trained in national academies in the region, learn to draw explanations for events from a lexicon largely constructed as part of post-WWI narrative. These vocabularies reflect strategies that seek to privilege the undifferentiated “nation-state” and its essentialist “ethno- national” character over the many different possible socio-political, economic, and inter-cultural orientations still at play in each “country” (Boškovic 2005). What ends up untold are the complex intermediate factors that often undermine the explanatory value of references to, for our purposes here, highland Albanian traditions of honor (Galaty 2013). 14 In the period of 1800 to 1918, local and regional politics of the western Balkans were messy, with competing factions operating under very different conditions depending on their relative position vis-à-vis imperial state competitions, sources of revenue such as mines or forests, or disputed borderlands. These factions, often changing in composition over even very short periods of time, catered to very different constituencies, be they in Austrian-administered Bosnia and Sanjak (Sancak in Modern Turkish), rural Macedonia, or the various coastal trading towns of the Adriatic and its hinterland. Rather than trying to clarify these complications, I wish to add to them by considering some of the conflicting agendas among those fluid clusters of actors straddling the political and commercial frontiers of the western Balkan provinces of the Ottoman Empire. In fact, it will be the intersections of multiple interests that prove especially useful to reconsidering what role implicit local violence (as opposed to actual violence) played in informing state and group actions. Identifying the threat of local Albanian violence, one that has always threatened the already fragile imperial order

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established by way of complicated interactions between local claimants to authority and external state authorities, may initiate new approaches to classifying “subaltern” agency that avoids reifying essentialist (Orientalist) tropes of the marginal in modern imperial states. That the lie of indigenous “honor” (besa) codes uniquely informed Albanian behavior was not only an extension of objectifying the “uncivilized” for purposes of “colonial knowledge”, but also of a set of possible rhetorical/ideological claims made by (and sometimes about) Albanians, forces us to take a new look at just where historic agency sits. 15 As discussed below, it is the ever-present possibility of violence that shapes how government officials, individuals and their communities in Malësi (called Malësorë) adapt to contingencies for which they themselves ultimately are responsible. Crucially, just how such officials and the objects of official reports—in our case here, Northern Albanians—cater to the reductive and misrepresentative tropes of the mountainous regions of the Balkans thus potentially becomes part of a dynamic that shapes a discourse of governance both in Istanbul and locally. In other words, the occasional reference to besa in Ottoman documentation and among indigenous actors may reflect a strategic attempt at harnessing Albanian honor in order to assure stability by way of threatening (or warning of) violence if certain measures are not taken. As such, policies were developed around as much the concern about the possibility of violence as actual violence itself, a concern that may have dominated the modern state’s rise in the early twentieth century to such an extent that indigenous “agency” may prove the critical intermediary force behind much of what we today assert is “modernity” (Blumi 2012: 94-116). 16 Due to the way physical, organized, and specifically directed violence transformed the texture of life in the Balkans immediately during and after the Tanzimat era, individuals and the communities they made often invested in new forms of association. These associations invariably conflicted directly with some evolving state-building projects as appeared in modified form after the Balkan Wars of 1912. In the case of the western Balkans, the very process of occupying Ottoman lands after victory in 1912, often by regimes composed of political and commercial elite with strong residual associations with the Ottoman state, suggests an intimacy between “enemies” that is neglected in the scholarship. There are, in other words, considerations at play that cannot rely on the clichés that leave an ethno-national or essentialist sociological imprint on the way we write about violence in the Ottoman provinces. 17 Taking this interpretive range into consideration, this study identifies different kinds of short and long-term social and political consequences of violence, as a conceptual possibility as much as an experience. In the first part of this intervention, I wish to highlight how ambiguous and inarticulate forces afflicting the larger post-empire regimes since 1912 misleadingly suggest important causal factors to the collapse of internal relations crucial to maintaining regional stability. Contrary to common belief, however, much of the problems associated with the increasingly manifested violence in the region actually stem from the idiosyncratic applications of “policies” (and how historians have chosen to read them later) that seemingly undermined the capacity of various state administrations to manage their regional affairs effectively in ways other than by way of violence. These “policies” correspond with a crucial outburst that animates much of the post-Ottoman Balkans/Anatolia/Middle East in the form of the “nationalist revolt” retrospectively imposed by the scholarship.

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18 The problem with writing this study on honor codes in Ottoman Albania is these forms of interaction so communicable to a twentieth-century audience cannot so easily be assumed to mirror what are essentially post-Ottoman social and political orientations that still require a World War to take place. In other words, the implicit threat of violently disrupting social order in post-Ottoman societies by way of mobilization along “ethnic” lines (often couched in terms of a community’s “honor”) proved only valuable in certain contexts; other forms of threats of violence (with actual displays of violence recorded at times) also animated daily politics. Linked to these periodic bursts of violent opportunism by indigenous actors tied to external as well as domestic interests (again, this did not have to mean literally violence, but its evocation as a form of threat) is the failure of Ottoman state mechanisms to resolve residual conflicts within, for our purposes here, “mixed” communities. The apparent failure to adapt approaches to resolving potentially (or not always) violent conflicts along the borderlands of the former Ottoman provinces led to the series of contingencies that animated new kinds of political forces. 19 It is crucial to highlight here that this is not to deny that authorities evoked Northern Albanian propensity for violence. Frequently in reports, the stereotype about Albanian stubbornness, bravery, backwardness, and hot-bloodedness seemed to determine policy decisions. There was certainly some kind of bureaucratic “understanding” of what were the essential forces at work in these dangerously volatile regions. My question here is just who was promoting these themes in the larger cultural context? Answering this in more complicated ways may provoke new suspicions about just what is at work in the Balkans during and after the Ottoman period. 20 To the many natives of the western Balkans who formed a large part of this bureaucratic class, the larger spirit of reform meant harnessing their localism to a larger state apparatus. With this considerable potential for power, they then often projected back to the region their personal and collective prejudices, which translated into exploitative, arrogant, and even violently hostile policies toward select groups. For many Young Ottomans of southern Albanian (Tosk) origin, therefore, the opportunity to “reform” parts of the western Balkans meant “naming” and characterizing the “nature” of these regions as well as devising schemes to implement “development” or “expansion” that again would seem to mirror the patronizing, often racist discourses associated with western European colonialism of the same period. This may constitute the long-term project of transforming the Wild Man of Albania’s highlands into a Noble Savage whose historic role would eventually be mediated by retrospective appropriations of heroic, nationalist violence. Such a marked transformation of roles for the Ottoman Albanian highlander poses, however, crucial ethical as well as methodological problems for us trying to historicize such policies today. 21 Hayden White (1972) has traced the place of the Noble Savage in western culture: Sometime in the late seventeenth century, says White, the image of wildness is fictionalized, that is, separated from an imagined essence of wildness that is turned to limited use as an instrument of intra-cultural criticism. Deriving from natural virtues long associated with the backwardness of uncivilized peoples, the Noble Savage serves as a positive contrast to the coercive norms of European civilization that unleashes such violent power. The indigenous guardian of local tradition thus can offer a resistance that in the right moment, reflects not only wildness, but functions equally as a valorization of those values lost to Modernity.

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22 Rousseau contributed to this discussion. Not only is the resistance of the savage an indictment of imperial violence with the “natural state” of the non-European fundamentally “free” and thus superior to the civilization from which Rousseau’s readers come, but the savage also provides the historical tension that makes/breaks empires. Another admirer of the outsider, Lord Byron, penned tropes to flesh out poetically what others sought to identify when challenging the Enlightenment and its inherent violence. The descriptions of Albania in Canto Two of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage anticipate the descriptions of Anatolian landscapes found in literature, letters, and reports filed by numerous idealistic Europeans, in particular missionaries. Albania, the domain of the savage men that offered a sublime alpine topography with a culture that is an amalgam of the Islamic faith and traditions of the warrior tribe is captured by Baron thus: Fierce are Albania’s children, yet they lack / Not virtues, were those virtues more nature / Where is the foe that ever saw their back? / Who can so well the toil of War endure? / Their native fastnesses not more secure / Than they in doubtful time of troublous need: / Their wrath how deadly! but their friendship sure, / When Gratitude or valour bids them bleed - / Unshaken rushing on wherever their Chief may lead (Lord Byron 1812). 23 Here then are all the topoi to be harvested by various “Orientalists” working for empire, right down to specific ethnographic details: the savage lived a violent but dignified existence, one rooted in a chivalrous code of behavior.

24 The Noble Savage is perhaps the most significant allegorical figure in the mythology of the western Balkans. If the Wild Man remained a shadowy nocturnal menace, the Noble Savage allowed for the emergence of the North Albanian highlander as a central protagonist in the shaping of modern, post-Ottoman, polities. Importantly, these criteria of prejudice were never fixed, and they were constantly changed as the world transformed around them. Individuals and groups alike constantly translated the meaning and value of these systems of differentiation—linking one’s association to regional affiliations Geg/Tosk, Bektashi/Catholic—to perceptions of power that, over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, changed in often dramatic ways. 25 The task now is to begin understanding these relations at their most subtle levels to retell western Balkan histories vis-à-vis the overhanging presence of violence (or the possibility of violence) during the late Ottoman period. 26 Studying what are ultimately exchanges rather than clashes reveals how Ottoman intellectuals and the western Balkan “masses” were equally complicit in a process that transformed the imperial project. In many ways, their attempts to assert distinctive associations in the terminology of millet and the disaggregation of those within each assumed “national” group gained importance in the late nineteenth century as many members of the Ottoman Balkan elite articulated frustrations with the lack of social mobility and perhaps the feeling of being trapped on the periphery of a more cosmopolitan and dynamic Ottoman society. It is at this time when various “identity” claims were reflected both in categories of state and local practice and as a category of analysis. As a category of practice, it was used increasingly (but not always!) by actors in everyday settings to make sense of themselves and their activities and, thus, communicate their specific interests to others through relative violence. Often, the identity claims used were framed in geographic terms with immediate assumed social proclivities towards violence induced by powerful “honor codes” long associated with

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“tribal” peoples throughout the region. So at one point, a set of local interests could be presented in the form of the immediate community—Hoti, Gruda, Kelmendi, and Kastrati—larger confederations of communities—Malësorë, Gegë, Bijelopavlić—or finally, entire regions—Montenegro/Karadağ, Kosova, Macedonia, Albania/Arnavutluk. 27 It is this last spatial configuration that is especially interesting; the evocation of what were geographic abstractions to identify a larger possible constituency, for instance, “Prizren”, “Drenica”, “Montenegro”, or “Arnavutluk”, was increasingly used to persuade some locals to understand themselves momentarily in one productive way and not another. The fact that such efforts were at the same time informed by concerns with lingering, parallel loyalties, shaped by regional stereotypes that created a conflicted interface between would-be nationalists, Ottoman loyalist instilling Ottoman nationalism, and “locals”. 28 The peoples known as Malësorë, Gegë, Bijelopavlić were all to be directly associated with a particularly popular cultural explanation for the occasional violence in their home regions. Being synonymous with violence required, however, further nuance that especially catered to the Albanian bureaucratic elites’ claims to having a particularly unique set of skills to “understand” these agents of potential violence. As such, a growing field among the reformist classes was to promote the ethnography of highlander “honor codes” to both suggest a primordial set of practices that, with proper oversight, could be harnessed, as well as suggest an explanation for why violence in strategically sensitive areas like these borderlands needed the direct attention of well-placed Tosk Albanians. 29 What is crucial to draw from exploring this interesting side effect of Young Ottoman policies is that these were all contingent and short-lived. The reification of different identity associations proved to be a social process, not just an intellectual practice. Analyzing this kind of politics leads us to an accounting of processes and mechanisms through which what has been called the “political fiction” of the nation becomes but one of many possibilities available to the many competing stakeholders in the western Balkans. As I constantly wish to iterate in my larger body of work, we must be careful not to assume that these periodic claims to broader associations mean what most post- Ottoman historians claim them to mean. These suddenly “modern” expressions of long- used strategies of engagement by locals vis-à-vis the larger world betray the underlying tensions of the empire often forgotten in the literature on Balkan nationalism. 30 Drawing on recent studies of late Ottoman literature and social commentary, in particular, helps to highlight how Ottoman intellectuals did not interpret events as manifestations of European, and thus foreign, cultural hegemony. From Ali Cevad, Lütfiye Hanım, and Ahmed Vefik to Ahmed Cevdet, Ottoman observers believed that local factors, along with outside machinations, accounted for the temporary, parochial, and isolated events in the Balkans (Boyar 2007). More importantly, these witnesses were particularly certain that the animating factors behind the occasional outbreak of violence were not linked to what we today call nationalism, but a primitivism that needed modernist intervention. 31 Crucially, the contingent actions of locals actually frustrated the ambitions of outside states as much as those of the Ottomans themselves to more clearly unify these communities. This proves crucial when considering the impact that contingencies had on how prominent Ottoman Balkan natives responded to the forces pushing and pulling the empire during the course of the middle years of the nineteenth century.

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32 The demonstrably ideological constructions of the “people”, therefore, did not take place in a social, cultural, or political vacuum. The targets of what became nationalist romanticism actually determined the extent to which important early “nationalists” could recreate their idealistic vision of the nation while also remaining committed to their Ottoman universe. We see this with the examples of the creative work of Sami Frashëri/Şemseddin Sami (henceforth Sami) (Kaleşi 1973). 33 Prominent southern Albanians such as Sami Frashëri formed a cohort that, even when faced with challenges to the empire, for the most part did not take the separatist route. Writing poems and plays, these men would serve as the foundation of the next phase of adaptation starting from 1875, when the world in which they emerged again threatened to crumble. That being said, they did not constitute a monolith easily framed in post-Ottoman categories like “Albanian”. They operated within a set of fluid social roles and thus had often contradictory expectations. The divergent careers of many can be appreciated, therefore, only by considering their individual ambitions, the impact reform efforts of the Ottoman state had on their particular set of networks, and the growing presence of outside powers whose money and promises of new kinds of opportunities successfully disrupted temporary alliances. 34 In this period, Ottoman state agencies presumed considerable power over the same “uncivilized” locals. At times, the overwhelming shift in strategies seemed to follow a clear trajectory toward a monopoly of coercive power in the hands of the state. Local despots linked to various ministries and parliamentarian bodies alike entertained absolutist ambitions as outsiders invested resources into a new vehicle—the state—to maximize the capacity of private capital to extract surplus from the world. Scholars in the twentieth century often unquestionably treat these confrontations in the Ottoman Balkans as representations of an indigenous effort of separation on the basis of a language, religion, sect, or historically fixed geographic terms. This is especially clear in regard to the misrepresentation of the drive to create a single mega province such as Syria in the Middle East, Tuna (Danube), Prizren, and then Arnavutluk (Albania) by key members of the Young Ottoman generation. What is conveniently forgotten is the context in which reformers such as Pomok Midhat Pasha initiated the last phase of reforms that created these mega provinces (Petrov 2006). 35 Some of the schemes that Midhat Pasha developed were the insertion of direct power via a newly reformed police force, the expansion of infrastructure, and schooling in the Niš sancak he governed. These policies coincided with the larger civilization-building project found throughout Europe at the time and mirrored the sentiments already discussed above among other native Balkan members of the Ottoman government. In other words, Midhat Pasha and the elite he represented began to convince historically independent communities to see their immediate interests as extending beyond the confines of their traditional areas (Saraçoğlu 2008). 36 The 1850s in autonomous Ottoman principalities such as Serbia and Montenegro witnessed a number of important measures implemented in the attempt to consolidate power around landed elites, a set of power shifts that translated into new forms of identity politics paralleling those in the rest of Europe. In rapid succession, the Ottoman state responded to some Slav leaders’ increasing overtures to Russia by investing considerable resources into securing, for instance, the area around Shkodër, the commercial hub of the region bordering Montenegro. Of the government agents charged with securing the area, the first, Ömar Lüfti, proved controversial (and

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counterproductive) because, between the years 1851 and 1853, he initiated the first attempt at directly taxing local communities (Reinkowski 2003: 249). 37 As a result of the predictably violent resistance to these taxes, a new generation of state officials elected to adopt a different set of reforms that spent less time focusing on taxing local landowners and more on simply co-opting them to serve the government in some capacity. For instance, under a new governor, Mustafa Pasha, the Ottoman state invited prominent locals to join a committee that brought all communities of Malësi together.9 Community leaders in the immediate area around the city of Shkodër who joined this committee, called the Committee of the Shkodër Mountains (CSHM), were given formal titles and salaries and were charged with the responsibility of ensuring stability and the smooth administration of areas previously only nominally under state control. Such overtures initiated a process of regional integration that would open the door for greater direct state rule in these previously isolated regions. They were also forged on the assumption certain hierarchies existed and entire regions could be best administered by co-opting members at the top of these pyramids forged by honor (or besa) pledges (Rira 2012). 38 The Young Ottomans, in other words, were institutionally formalizing a communal identity of the Malësorë for the purposes of administering the region under a regime that avoided the outbreak of possible violence. Of course, to do this effectively, they sometimes needed to manipulatively exaggerate the threat of violence to those holding the purse-strings, knowing full well that the stereotypes about the violent nature of the highland Albanians would be persuasive justification for the delivery of even more state resources. In this respect, while their agenda may have been to consolidate the authority of the Ottoman state, the principal agents of this policy at the local level— Hasan Tahsini (first director of Istanbul University, known in Albanian literature as Hoxha Tahsini), the Frashëri brothers, Zef Jubani, and Pashko Vasa10—were not immune to the regionalism that the reforms had sought to erase. For one, considerable tension existed between these activists of reform and the constituents they hoped to co-opt in large part because these state representatives, even though they were “Albanians” in some sense, were largely viewing their local intermediaries through the prism of their proclivity for primitive cultural habits. This tension distorted an otherwise straightforward example of state centralization that confounds the simplistic nationalist paradigms in vogue today.

Reforming Home for the Empire

39 Since Tosk officials played a central role in the application, if not the outright design, of these policies in the western Balkans, the seat of government in Istanbul adopted different strategies for Tosk and Geg territories. As already suggested, Toskë based in Istanbul and embedded in the reformist regime had few to no links in Kosova and Işkodra while maintaining strong personal connections with their home regions further south. As a result, Tosk Ottoman reformers were selective when evoking the expansion of direct state control of the western Balkans. One of the ways this was manifested was the attitude of Tosk elite toward the mountainous regions in Malësi, which they believed constituted the biggest threat to Ottoman development. The projects adopted by the future luminaries of Ottoman-Tosk culture were thus underpinned by a clear sense of frustration over the lack of “order” in the mountainous

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regions. Among other things, these reformers felt that unless these autonomous mountainous regions were formally incorporated into the larger Ottoman society, it would be through these areas that Russia or Austria-Hungary would be able to penetrate the empire. Events further to the north in Bosnia during the 1860s and 1870s proved these fears to be justified. The idea then was to promote an aggressive campaign of civilization building at the expense of local autonomy, and often at the end of a gun.11

40 Already in 1857, reformers were attempting to expand on earlier efforts to assert state influence in Malësi by working with the local Catholic clergy, who were asked to address the so-called blood feuds problem, a debilitating series of vendettas that had kept highland communities in a state of perpetual warfare. In lieu of using force, new strategies to bring the region some stability included the strengthening of a religious presence (by building more churches and mosques) and a greater investment in direct government involvement in the area by building police stations, courthouses, and schools. As revealed in the fine work of Hasan Kaleshi (1964: 110), Ottoman reformers started to address these issues by slowly establishing judicial uniformity and normalizing the daily interactions between state officials and the local population. In particular, reformers hoped that the investment in government structures could solidify the authority of Ottoman judges, who, with the coaxing of clergy, would begin to replace a violent social domain largely inaccessible to the state. In essence, the goal of these early reforms was to replace the local leaders who had been the major arbiters in peoples’ lives with streamlined state surrogates who would always assist Istanbul while helping unify a society traditionally fragmented by blood feuds. 41 At times such efforts would require the old strategy of simply co-opting rivals by appointing them as the chief of a newly created police station or the headmaster of a new school. The subtleties of modern state-building, however, did not allow for this age-old policy of buying loyalty and pitting rivals against each other to be the sole substitute for direct rule. New methods initiated during the Tanzimat took a cultural track as much as an institutional one. In the context of instituting greater direct Ottoman administration of the highland regions, an often public animosity toward the “tribal habits” practiced in “savage mountain districts” increasingly made its way into the documents and early newspapers (Deringil 2003: 322). The strong community identifiers along fis or “tribal” lines in the highlands clearly juxtaposed loyalty to family and community with good citizenship, as demanded by the Tosk officials linked to the Ottoman state (Reinkowski 2005a and b). The assumed inaccessibility of such communities required direct state intervention that combined bureaucratic measures and cultural chauvinism. 42 In the end, the rise of tropes about backward tribal culture represents a crucial shift in the Ottoman rule of the western Balkans. For many Ottoman officials from Tosk regions, the Malësor savage was as much a tool of state expansion as the institutions that were meant to civilize these people.12 Such thinking has parallels in other modern societies of course and scholars theorize such relations in the literature. Much like the Ottomans, other empires faced similar administrative problems as they absorbed large tracts of the Americas, most of Africa, and southern Asia. 43 Remarkably, the stated animus toward the Malësorë and their “uncivilized” nature did not arise from the Tosk Ottoman elite alone. By the time the Tanzimat reformers were making their move into the region, native sons were also vocal critics of the Malësorë

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resistance. The few agents of state expansion who actually came from the regions targeted for reform were prepared to accommodate not only the growing state presence in their homeland but also its use of some of the more pernicious cultural tools of the modern state: the politics of civilization. For example, both Zef Jubani and Pashko Vasa, influential Gegë with long track records of service to the Ottoman state, shared with their Tosk allies a certain intellectual distance from the people living in the north, particularly the rugged mountains. In particular, Shkodër-native Zef Jubani decried the failure of the Tanzimat reforms to reach the Malësorë. He not only blamed bureaucratic incompetence for this but also offered a cultural explanation for the ultimate failure of reforms to reach the region: Jubani saw the continued lack of government presence in these areas as the result of the resistance by the “uncivilized” Malësorë to progress by way of intractable “honor” codes. 44 As I discussed earlier, this strategy, at least in the western Balkans, originated when a number of Ottoman reformers, including many Toskë and several Gegë, wanted to smooth over the communal signifiers of difference—religious or “tribal”—increasingly stimulated by outside patronage. To accomplish this, reformers until the 1860s advocated a realignment of the institutions governing the provinces in the hope that they would help create, through educational and economic development schemes, new criteria of association advocated by the work of Sami Frashëri.

Sami: The Patriarch of Tosk Cultural and Regional Elitism

45 From his earliest writings in the 1870s until his death in 1904, Sami probably represents the single most important Ottoman intellectual of the Hamidian period.13 Contrary to the way he is portrayed today, a close look at his work leaves the impression that he wavered throughout his adult life with conflicted loyalties. Both Turkish and Albanian historians have made persuasive arguments linking his work to larger exclusivist narratives; their strategies have focused mainly on either ignoring the consequences of studying Sami’s entire body of work outside its Ottoman context or, at best, vetting his writings that contravene their particular frame of analysis as mere intellectual anomalies.

46 It would be a mistake, however, to see Sami Frashëri’s “contradictory” loyalties as in any way strange in light of what happened throughout the western Balkans during this period. Seeing oneself as sharing a regional heritage with a larger Ottoman identity was not necessarily a contradiction in the late Ottoman period.14 Instead, Sami’s vast body of work on the Ottoman language and the composition of his invaluable encyclopedias all speak of a man firmly embedded in an intellectual current connecting him to like- minded Ottomans and the larger world (Dağlıoğlu 1934). As a result, his purported links with the parochialisms of Albanian nationalism is more a reflection of post-Ottoman cultural politics than a meaningful observation of the context within which he and his political allies were operating at the time. 47 This brings us back to the disciplinary role of reformers in the Balkans. Sami’s early writings all point to an attempt to strengthen the Ottoman Empire by lecturing and, if possible, shaming Gegë and especially Malësorë for the manner in which they engaged with the world around them. Sami’s first serious work, the play discussed below, and

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his many articles published in Istanbul newspapers all focused on a social engineering theme that reflected the general spirit of his generation: reforming the cultural peripheries of Ottoman society. Moreover, much like the reformers based in the Balkans, the idea of a single regional province (be it Arnavutluk or Prizren) became central in his mind to protecting what remained of the empire’s Balkan territories and preserving its Islamic heritage.15 48 As already noted, the issue of civilization proved central to realizing these reforms, and it would be the task of educated, “civilized” men such as Sami and his brothers to edify the backward regions of the Ottoman Empire on this point. In one of the most celebrated works attributed to Sami he actually discusses at length the differences between Gegë and Toskë in terms of the savagery that paradoxically helped to preserve archaic forms of authentic Geg culture while the Toskë were changed by western civilization. Admittedly, his informative ethnographic studies also emphasized these regional differences.16 According to Sami, the principal distinction between people alongside their geographic distance was their level of education. Couched in terms of being civilized and uncivilized, Sami clearly delineated the role that subjects of the Ottoman state would play in the reform efforts that energized his generation. Often one finds in his work direct reference to the intellectual and cultural gap that existed between “tribal” highlanders and his own educated cohort. In this context, Sami used the trope of the quintessential “warrior race” and their cultural tools, revolving around the “besa” (or oath sworn “in blood”, with which much of the Ottoman public was familiar), to discuss the state’s role in shaping Balkan life.17 In this regard, some of Sami’s work introduces a counterintuitive dynamic in which he hoped that Malësorë and highland peoples throughout the Balkans would feel obligated to join in the effort of strengthening and unifying the empire’s vulnerable northern frontier. 49 First released in 1874, Frashëri’s play Besa Yahud Ahde Vefa (Besa or testimony of loyalty) represents quite vividly this underlying tension in Ottoman elite circles.18 Particularly among the Toskë who made up a significant proportion of the empire’s educated elite, the uncultured, brutal, and fearsome highlander was a problem. Sami’s play reveals this sentiment inasmuch as it tries to lay down for his audience a stark contrast between the habits and customs of uneducated mountain peasants and people who were cultured, urbane, and part of a structured hierarchy. His characters spell out the dividing line separating civilization from barbarity and imperial demise from the promise of the empire. The tragic lesson of his story is the danger of deviating from a clearly laid out Tanzimat plan that suppresses the application of personal and communal law to ensure the exclusive arbitrator role of the state.19 50 For Sami Frashëri and his fellow intellectuals based in Istanbul, the practices of blood honor and strong “clan loyalties” were particularly detrimental to the efforts of the Ottoman state to bring reform to the key frontier districts.20 This is evident in Sami’s play as he blurs the lines normally separating the hero from the villain. One of his main characters, the southern-born Tepedelenli Demir Bey (by designation, a gentleman and officer of the state), is used to issue a warning to the audience. One of his own officers, who himself is from a respected city family, threatens the natural hierarchy in the Ottoman society by lusting after a beautiful village girl who is already engaged. Demir Bey warns the audience that the educated, urban, and noble families charged with administering the wild lands should refrain from interfering with the domestic affairs of the “tribal” characters found in the mountains. In other words, one needs to stick to

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one’s social and political circles when it comes to issues of family and romance. As the audience is forewarned, tragedy befalls the region when an impetuous junior ignores Demir Bey’s pleas to not mix with the highlanders and pursues the innocent local beauty, whose own loyalties and love (both pure and idealized) rest with a man of her community. In the end, it is clear to the audience that trouble comes to those who disrupt a pattern of socialization that, while perhaps archaic, still needs to be respected (Şemseddin Sami 1875: 89-100). 51 Juxtaposed with this message of class boundaries is the confrontation between power and injustice that makes Sami’s play a helpful tool for studying the entire period. The Tanzimat was not meant to bring state power to bear on the wild people of the mountains as much as justice, order, and the straightforward application of the law throughout the empire. While the violence of local justice clearly denotes the necessity for universal legal codes administered by the Ottoman state, it is not just the backward customary law that needs regulation. Demir Bey, the appointed official and powerful landlord of the region, is also culpable in Sami’s play. He oversteps his authority when he tries to compel a father to surrender his beautiful daughter to the governor’s infatuated officer. While Demir Bey is wise enough to advise his officer not to pursue a shepherd’s daughter, he still makes the fatal mistake of acting unjustly toward the father when his officer’s impetuous behavior leads the locals to challenge the hierarchy of power. While they should not interact with locals, the moment the latter resist the wishes of the elite, all codes of behavior must take a back seat. 52 Interestingly, Sami uses the illiterate, simple but proud shepherd to alert the audience to the fact that after the Tanzimat reforms there can be no more arbitrary use of power (ibid.: 102-105). This is the second side of Frashëri’s story: the Tanzimat is the mechanism that preserves order, and while respect is due to the class of powerful men, they cannot abuse it by simply imposing demands, especially unreasonable ones such as handing over an engaged daughter to a smitten officer. The consequences for the empire are dire. 53 Through the mechanism of a stereotypical representation of the form of agreement in highlander societies predicated on honor—the besa—Frashëri offers in his play a social formula for integrating Malësi, Gegëni, and the southern highland communities into the Ottoman fold. No longer shall true subjects be loyal to backward ideals and customary laws. Rather, through their “ancient” honor-bound system, they shall declare an oath/ besa to the empire as a mechanism that will free them from their self-destructive behavior, while also promising them just treatment by enlightened and restrained governors. United under the guidance of the Ottoman state, these simple people could serve a vital role in preserving the homeland (vatan): in this context, a vital part of the Ottoman Empire. 54 The rise of the autocratic Hamidian regime and consolidation of the palace’s authority at the expense of a generation of liberal state reformists led to 40 years of give and take in the halls of power and provincial governance. As argued elsewhere, in response to the 1877–8 fiasco, members of the Midhat Pasha generation did not give up, but actively continued to lobby the Porte and then secretly created underground movements to advocate the reinstatement of a policy that reconstituted the western Balkans into a single administrative area dominated by a Tosk Arnavut ruling class.21 55 The apparent ascendancy of Pan-Slavism in the Balkans as a result of Russia’s military victory rendered obsolete these early attempts to secure loosely defined constituencies

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by way of reordering provinces to fit within one administration. The strategy of creating the mega province of Arnavutluk, in particular, would ultimately be sacrificed as a new political order in Istanbul followed the palace coup of 1876 and the rise of the new sultan. This new state of reactionaries responded to the nearly total military defeat that was instigated by divisive forces of communalism originating outside the empire—Pan-Slavism and the Megali Idea—with a new strategy for social organization. Abdülhamid’s regime would not equivocate and constantly experimented with tactics to disrupt the ability of groups to consolidate influence over vulnerable populations, a strategy Tanzimat reformers had once believed would help Istanbul rule the empire more efficiently. What happened in 1877–8 thus exposes a significant strategic divide within loyal but competing segments of Ottoman society. For those reformers from an earlier generation, still convinced of their vision of a loyal, militarily secure Ottoman Empire based on formally consolidated millets, they would have to struggle in opposition while a new generation of impassioned conservatives reacted to local contingencies in a new way. This tension over how to best react to the dramatic shift in fortunes as a result of the 1877–8 war was the crucial sociopolitical force at work for the last 40 years of Ottoman history (Karpat 2001).

The Legacy of “Soft” Violence

56 I have long argued that various manifestations of local agency—trade, politics, social, and cultural exchange—destabilizes the modern border-as-extension-of-state model of observing events. In place of the assumed geographic order the 1878 diplomatically drawn boundaries offered the region, peoples living within these reconstituted “borderlands” experienced the parallel trajectories of the still unharnessed modern world. In this regard, beyond laying out a detailed study of the new frontier administrations the new states of Montenegro and Serbia had to impose on their frontiers, I introduce cases of local mobilization that ultimately challenged these new borderland regimes and the sense of possibility for various political entrepreneurs directly affected by the Balkan Wars. In these cases, it was the contradictory demands of governance in reaction to local contingency, often introduced by investment schemes, that open up avenues of action for a number of indigenous actors and hence permit our rereading of the region’s history at large, both prior to, and after, the Balkan Wars themselves.

57 That ascendant locals like Esad Pasha Toptani emerged in this period with considerable power only partially tells the story, however. Their activism did force ascendant regional state administrations to adapt to conditions they created on the ground, but as a result of a combination of factors, these adjustments created even more channels of engagement for locals. The consequences were a growing list of potential constituents, clients, and rivals to these ascendant locals and all the competing states created by the Treaty of Berlin in 1878—an Austro-Hungarian regime in Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Sancak, Serbia, Montenegro, Romania and an expended Greece. 58 Reconsidering the complex interplay of pre-WWI state-building measures as reflective of local dynamics inducing, and reacting to, multiple external interventions, thus offers us an opportunity to explore the complexity of the modern world through largely ignored indigenous channels that are informed by the very Ottoman context in which they emerge. In a word, we are not simply dealing with nation-states and national

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heroes defined by boundaries. The transformations that contributed to the foundations of war in the Western Balkan towns remained a local experience that was then translated in other forms once filtered through the emerging state bureaucracies of the era. 59 What such a series of events suggests is that a local proved key to the initial process of accessing local natural resources.22 These developments could only happen with the collaboration of local leaders like Prenk bib Doda, who, thanks to the lobbying of Ottoman officials by the Austro-Hungarian diplomats in Vienna and Istanbul, was soon after freed from his exile.23 Interestingly, by the very fact Prenk bid Doda claimed authority (and thus ownership of these resources) the diplomacy that set him free put the burden of enforcement on the Catholic leader. This was crucial as locals, many deciding that Prenk bib Doda no longer represented their interests, resisted. The once primordial besa that supposedly tied an exiled “leader” to his people had broken, leading to any number of subsequent political reorderings of life in the larger Shkodër area. These changes were shaped on an alliance between commercial interests, the Ottoman state and rivals to Prenk bib Doda who were expected to use, and eagerly enforced, violent authority over the assumed subjects of once powerful “tribal” leaders who needed to be exiled. Such reorientation ultimately compelled key factions to reach beyond “traditional” spheres of association, including forming alliances with once rival/expansionist land owning families like the Toptanis. The long-term consequences of such an orientation of Shkodër political life will be discussed in later work; for now, the key point is these tropes functioned but not according to factors that take us beyond seeking the documented interactions between assumed local patriarchs and their state intermediaries. 60 As recently argued, the crucial link to begin to undermine the methodological shortcomings of past focus on such documented hierarchies is the aforementioned refugee populations that reoriented themselves, in large part, to serve as key extensions of various rival centers of power that undermined already constantly changing political alliances (Blumi 2013). Of those who opposed the expansion of predatory capitalism at the expense of their constituencies’ wealth (and culture), refugees from the former Niš province and Herzegovina provided ample manpower to threaten violence. Similarly, Malësorë villagers were often mobilized to descend into town during market day, in full warrior attitude, to help express discomfort and frustration with certain decisions made by authorities and their erstwhile commercial partners. Indeed, these displays of formidable potential violence, coupled by the appearance of outspoken local-born priests, often impressed outsiders to believe, with the benefit of hindsight, that these could be the foundations of Albanian nationalist uprisings that destabilized the last of the Ottoman Balkans in 1910, and have since been glorified in Albanian nationalist historiography. 61 In this manner, revisiting the violent events in the region at the turn of the century contributes to the paradigm shift sought here. The cause for which well-armed mixed çeta groups fought the state and each other, which have long been mistakenly attributed to “ancient” ethnic and/or sectarian hatreds or a natural predilection to violence among backward Balkan peoples, can be more fruitfully explained by seeing events as a struggle to secure a safe home for family and fellow-community members. The events taking place in the late Ottoman Balkans were actually part of a productive exchange, no matter how contrived the nationalist tropes by a self-appointed

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intellectual vanguard rhetorically co-opting historical events in places like the larger Işkodra province may be. In fact, when the two contradictory states of social, economic, and political existence met (when, for example, Serbian state agents paid “Christian” peasants to fire guns at their Muslim neighbors) a sort of productive “friction” took place that ultimately constituted the historical force studied here. A more complicated analysis of what were the possible alternative agendas at play among some of the top personalities retroactively associated with nationalism in the western Balkans, in our case for the moment, Albanians like Esad Pasha Toptani, may help make the larger subversion of dominant paradigms in the historiography easier to accept.

Conclusion

62 There are, beyond the concerns with neighboring states’ primordial/ideological interests in these regions, socio-economic explanations to consider. Moreover, these socio-economic rationales stem from an intimacy of direct, often collaborative exchange between constituencies that only in the war proved categorically antagonistic. For example, the appropriation of wealth by the victors, especially the property of many natives of the region, deserves our attention. Considering there are linking commercial interests involved in how property was taken from the previous inhabitants of western Balkan towns like Shkodër (and its suburbs) may help provide depth to the manner in which administrations, forced to deal with the threat of violence, approached potential instability in different ways after 1912. These evolving strategies of coercion and/or collaboration mobilized by officials who were often intimate with the constituencies they were expected to govern—as rivals or as partners —promises a complex set of layers to study late Ottoman/early post-Ottoman societies. Part of the task in respect to this is avoiding the presumption that violence in such settings is inevitable on account of primordial codes of behavior that limit how we can interpret honor. This skepticism extends to questioning how the threat of violence as a form of Ottoman and post-Ottoman state discourse was only ever addressed when geo- strategic conditions in the larger Balkans changed.

63 Taking this interpretive range into consideration, this study identified different kinds of short and long-term social and political consequences of violence, as a conceptual possibility as much as an experience. Contrary to common belief, much of the problems associated with the increasing manifested violence in the region after 1878 actually stem from the idiosyncratic applications of “reforms” (and how historians have chosen to read them later) that seemingly undermined the capacity of various state administrations to manage their regional affairs effectively. These “reforms” correspond with a crucial outburst of what I call elsewhere “ethnic entrepreneurialism” that animates much of the Ottoman Balkans after 1878 in the form of the “nationalist revolt” retrospectively imposed by the scholarship (Blumi 2012: 110-116). The problem is these forms so communicable to a 21st century audience cannot so easily be assumed to mirror what are essentially post-Ottoman social and political orientations that still require a World War to take place. In other words, the implicit threat of violently disrupting social order in Ottoman (and nominally independent post-Ottoman states like Serbia, Greece and Montenegro) by way of mobilization along “ethnic” lines proved only valuable in certain contexts; other forms

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of threats of violence (with actual displays of violence recorded at times) also animated daily politics in the Ottoman Balkans that was mediated by oaths of honor or besa. 64 As suggested above, one possible approach to untangling the web of assumptions linking the prevailing stereotypes about how Balkan societies (at least in designated zones of backwardness) functioned with violence (or its potential) is to invest in studying the role natives of these societies objectified and perhaps exploited the stereotypes for their own careers. As needed intermediaries, the likes of Albanian- origin bureaucrats seem to have developed a particularly important reputation for “understanding” their objectified Albanian cousins. Placed in the context of lingering concerns in Istanbul about the very capacities of the reforming/transforming state to sustain direct rule in regions long assumed too primitive to fully embrace modernity on their own terms, regions like Malësi and its inhabitants long became the object of wild stories about the equivalent of the “wild west”. Crucially, I suggest many of the late Ottoman perpetrators of this menace to Ottoman reforms were themselves self- identified Albanians, whose insights into these societies would necessarily give their own authority greater weight, a kind of authenticity claim to local knowledge which linked primordial honor codes long associated with “besa” (a local term that eventually made it into the nomenclature of Ottoman and post-Ottoman state bureaucracies) to the greater cause of Modernity.24

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anastasopoulos, Antonis (2007) ‘Albanians in the Ottoman Balkans,’ in Kolovos, Elias; Kotzageorgis, Phokion; Laiou, Sophia; Sariyannis, Marinos (eds.), The Ottoman Empire, the Balkans, the Greek Lands: Toward a Social and Economic History, Studies in Honor of John C. Alexander, Istanbul, Isis Press, pp. 37-47.

Avlonyalı Ekrem Bey (Dirim, Atilla, trans.) (2006) Osmanlı Arnavutluk’undan Anılar (1885-1912), Istanbul, İletişim.

Bilmez, Bülent (2003) ‘Sami Frashërior Šemseddin Sami? Mythologization of an Ottoman Intellectual in the Modern Turkish and Socialist Historiographies based on “Selective Perception” ’, Balkanologies: revue d’études pluridisciplinaires 7 (2), pp. 19–46, URL: http:// balkanologie.revues.org/492.

Blumi, Isa (2011) Reinstating the Ottomans: Alternative Balkan Modernities, 1800-1912, New York, Palgrave McMillan.

Blumi, Isa (2012) Foundations of Modernity: Human Agency and the Imperial State, London, Routledge.

Blumi, Isa (2013) Ottoman Refugees, 1878-1939: Migration in a Post-Imperial World, London, Bloomsbury Academic.

Boškovic, Aleksandar (2005) ‘Distinguishing “self” and “other”: Anthropology and National Identity in Former Yugoslavia’, Anthropology Today 21 (2), pp. 8-13, URI: http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1111/j.0268-540X.2005.00339.x

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Boyar, Ebru (2007) ‘The Representation of the Balkans’, in Boyar, Ebru, Ottomans, Turks and the Balkans: Empire Lost, Relations Altered, London, Tauris Academic Studies, pp. 42-71.

Burda, Ervis (2012) Customary Law and the Nation: The Significance of Kanun in the Emergence and Development of Albanian Nationalist Discourse, unpubl. PhD diss., SUNY Empire State College, URL: http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/91824

Cushman, Thomas (2004) ‘Anthropology and Genocide in the Balkans: An Analysis of Conceptual Practices of Power’, Anthropological Theory 4 (1), pp. 5-28, URI: http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1177/1463499604040845.

Dağlıoğlu, Hikmet Turhan (1934) Şemsettin Sami Bey: Hayatı ve Eserleri, Istanbul, Resimli Ay Matbaası.

Deringil, Selim (2003) ‘“They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery”: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-Colonial Debate’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 45 (2), pp. 311-42, URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3879318.

Durham, Mary Edith (1909) High Albania, London, Edward Arnold, URL: http://archive.org/ details/afg4972.0001.001.umich.edu.

Durham, Mary Edith (1910) ‘High Albania and its Customs in 1908’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 40, pp. 453-72, URL: http://archive.org/details/ highalbaniaitscu00durh.

Frashëri, Sami (1988) Vepra, 2 vols., Tirana, Instituti i Historisë.

Frashëri, Sami Bey (Ypi Kolonja, Abdyl, trans.) (1901) Besa: Drame me ghashte pamje, Sofia, Mbrothesia.

Galaty, Michael L. (2013) ‘An Offense to Honor Is Never Forgiven…: Violence and Landscape Archeology in Highland Northern Albania’, The Archaeology of Violence: Indeterdisciplinary Approaches 2, pp. 143-57.

Gawrych, George W. (2006) The Crescent and the Eagle: Ottoman Rule, Islam and the Albanians, 1874– 1913, London, I.B. Tauris.

Herzfeld, Michael (1982) Ours once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece, Austin: University of Texas Press.

Herzog, Christoph; Motika Raoul (2000) ‘Orientalism “alla turca”: Late 19th / Early 20th Century Ottoman Voyages into the Muslim “Outback”‘, Die Welt des Islams 40 (2), pp. 139-95, URL: http:// www.jstor.org/stable/1570642.

İnalcık, Halil (1993) ‘Tanzimat’ın Uygulanması ve Sosyal Tepkiler’, in İnalcık, Halil, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu: toplum ve ekonomi üzerinde arşiv çalışmaları, incelemeler, Istanbul, Eren Yayıncılık, pp. 361-424.

Kaleshi, Hasan (1964) ‘Türkische Angaben über den Kanun des Leka Dukadjini’, in Reichenkron, Günter; Schmaus, Alois (eds.) Die Kultur Südosteuropas: ihre Geschichte und ihre Ausdrucksformen, Vorträge, gehalten auf der Balkanologen-Tagung der Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft zu München vom 7.-10. Nov. 1962, Wiesbaden, Otto Harrassowitz, pp. 103–12.

Kaleşi, Hasan (1973) ‘Şemsettin Sami Fraşeri’nin Siyasi Görüşleri,’ in VII. Türk Tarih Kongresi, Ankara, Türk Tarih Kurumu, pp. 644-654.

Karpat, Kemal H. (2001) The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

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Lord Byron (1812) ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’, Canto the Second, Stanza LXV, URL: http:// knarf.english.upenn.edu/Byron/charold2.html.

Makdisi, Ussama (2002) ‘Ottoman Orientalism’, American Historical Review 107 (3), pp. 768-96.

Petrov, Milen V. (2006) Tanzimat for the Countryside: Midhat Paşa and the Vilayet of Danube, 1864-1868, unpubl. Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton University, Princeton.

Pula, Besnik (2013) ‘Binding Institutions: Peasants and Nation-State Rule in the Albanian Highlands, 1919–1939’, Political Power and Social Theory 25, pp. 37-70, URI: http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1108/S0198-8719(2013)0000025008.

Reinkowski, Maurus (2003) ‘Double Struggle, No Income: Ottoman Borderlands in Northern Albania’, International Journal of Turkish Studies 9, pp. 239-53, URL: http://www.freidok.uni- freiburg.de/volltexte/3156/pdf/Reinkowski_Double_struggle.pdf.

Reinkowski, Maurus (2005a) ‘Aḥmed Cevdet Efendis Mission nach Shkodër’, in Reinkowski, Maurus, Die Dinge der Ordnung: eine vergleichende Untersuchung über die osmanische Reformpolitik im 19. Jahrhundert, Munich, R. Oldenbourg Verlag, pp. 189–94.

Reinkowski, Maurus (2005b) ‘Zusammenfassende Diskussion’, in Reinkowski, Maurus, Die Dinge der Ordnung: eine vergleichende Untersuchung über die osmanische Reformpolitik im 19. Jahrhundert, Munich, R. Oldenbourg Verlag, pp. 264–78.

Rira, Miranda (2012) ‘Anomie and Honor in the Albanian Society’, Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences 3 (3), pp. 203-210. URI: http://www.mcser.org/images/stories/2_journal/ mjss_september_2012/miranda%20rira.pdf.

Saraçoğlu, M. Safa (2008) ‘Some Aspects of Ottoman Governmentality at the Local Level: The Juicio-Administrative Sphere of the Vidin County in the 1860s and 1870s’, Ab Imperio 8 (2), pp. 223-54.

Sommers, Tamler (2009) ‘The Two Faces of Revenge: Moral Responsibility and the Culture of Honor,’ Biology & Philosophy 24 (1), pp. 35-50, URI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10539-008-9112-3.

Şemseddin Sami (1875) Besa Yahud Ahde Vefa: Altı Fasıldan Ibaret Facia, Istanbul, Tasvir-i Efkar Matbaası.

Şemseddin Sami, (1996) Kamus al-A’lam: Tarih ve Coğrafya Lugati ve Tabir-i Esahhiyle Kaffe-yi Esma-yı Hassayı Camiidir, 6 vols., Istanbul, Mihran Matbaası, 1306 [1889]; repr. Ankara, Kaşgar Neşriyat.

White, Hayden (1972) ‘The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea’, in Dudley, Edward; Novak, Maximillian E. (eds.) The Wild Man within an Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, pp. 150-182, URL: http://abuss.narod.ru/ Biblio/eng/white_tropics.pdf.

NOTES

1. “Imperial” interests in the Balkans include Italy’s delicate balancing of its immediate strategic interests and long-term concerns with expanding Greek, Serbian/Russian, and Austro-Hungarian influence. In this context, massaging relations with locals to suit one external set of interests at the expense of others may require considerable “local knowledge” that at once exploits domestic honor codes and assures indigenous sensibilities are not insulted. 2. I am ready to concede that this deeper elaboration of causes and consequences in a geographically limited arena only further muddies the waters. At the same time, however, I must

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stress the importance of not seeking to encapsulate in any single narrative the dynamics contributing to and ultimately transforming the lives of those involved, even in such a narrow scope as covered here. Therefore, I am offering a corrective in the sense that it offers other possible ways to asking questions of our sources, in effect highlighting events transpiring prior to, during and after the wars as stimulants for new social, political, economic, and/or cultural orientations. 3. The selective use of “tradition” has long been a favorite method of national mythmaking in the Balkans, with well-established projects of defining Greek identity through “folklore” studies the useful example to which we can point as I proceed to analyze critically equivalent uses in Albanian sources (Herzfeld 1982). 4. The most famous agent of empire who traveled and “studied” the inhabitants was Edith Durham (1910). 5. Most often, the act of violence is imposed with a variant that the participants were “honor- bound” thus excluding analytical alternatives as possible explanations. According to scholars inclined to find universal causality in ethno-cultural patterns among pre-modern peoples, in Northern Albania, custom and duty account for the violence (Sommers 2009). 6. A nuance highlighted in (Reinkowski 2003: 248). 7. Therefore, simply referring to “Albanians” in a wider Ottoman context may be missing the regional distinctions that many prominent Ottoman officials, again, many of whom were of Albanian origin, used to differentiate just who was targeted for reform. Many who write on “Ottoman” attitudes toward “Albanians” miss this nuance (Anastasopoulos 2007). 8. An essentialism that was not exclusively European (Deringil 2003; Herzog, Motika 2000). 9. Başbakanlık Arşivi (BBA), Irade Dahiliye 23192, Message to newly appointed administrator of Shkodër, Mustafa Pasha, dated 1856, p. 1. 10. Also known as Wassa Effendi and/or Vaso Pasha in the documentation. 11. Military expeditions were often a product of such strategies, leaving stubbornly autonomous people of Malësi constantly facing state violence advocated by southern Tosk officials. For details of one such campaign that originated in Dibër in the height of the winter, see Haus, Hauf und Staatsarchiv (HHStA), PA, XXXVIII, 201, Wassitch to Andrassy, dated Scutari, Dec. 23, 1873. 12. Even well into the Abdülhamid period, authorities debated the best approach to changing the region. In one report, demands were made for additional judges and police officers and for schools to be set up in Malësi as the region suffered from many of the same ills mentioned by the reforms in the 1860s: BBA, Yıldız Sadaret Resmî Maruzat Evrakı (YA.RES), 71/35, No. 339, Yıldız Sarayı to Meclis-i Vükela, dated 5 Safer 1312 (Aug. 9, 1894). 13. Revealingly, Turkish nationalists today spend considerable time making the claim that Sami’s loyalties lay with a modern Turkish identity, framed in Ottoman terms, in direct contrast to claims that Sami was unequivocally an Albanian nationalist (Bilmez 2003). I argue that Sami was a loyal Ottoman subject who not only advocated the development of regional vernaculars such as Toskërisht but also emphasized the need for Ottoman to be the language of an empire that was the cultural melting pot of the eastern Mediterranean and Central Asian world. 14. In letters written in Toskërisht to activists in Italy and elsewhere, Sami notes a tension between what some beyond the Ottoman Empire hoped was the beginning of a drive for political separation and a still strong sense of affiliation among prominent Ottoman-Arnavut/Shqiptar, figures such as Sami. See Albanian National Archives (AQSH), F.51.D.4.f.1–3, Sami Frashëri to Jeronim de Rada, dated Istanbul, Feb. 20, 1881. 15. Sami was unambiguous in identifying Albanians (Arnavutlar) of all faiths, as well as Muslim Slavs, as integral parts of the great Islamic nation and as members of the Ottoman state. This is an emphasis on social cohesion in the larger empire on Islamic terms that are rarely pointed out today (Frashëri 1988, 1: 21).

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16. Sami Frashëri was a careful scholar and his meticulously written encyclopedia provides insight into a world he had no problem segregating into regions—Gegalık and Toskalık—and even more narrowly into villages that he and his fellow Ottoman subjects felt had shaped their own personal hybrid identity. Sami, for one, asserts that his hometown was a bastion of civilization set in a larger Balkan/Albanian context of ignorance. See his entry for his hometown (Şemseddin Sami 1996, 5: 3353). 17. The working trope infused much of the popular literature—and resulting “scholarship”—in the Habsburg Empire, a crucial player in shaping inter-communal relations for the years leading to World War I. The Ottoman state learned of stories in Vienna newspapers about the particularities of Albanian honor codes, that they were a source of disloyalty to the Sultan, a wedge many in Vienna’s power circles hoped to exploit. BBA, Bab-ı Ali Evrak Odası 340/25431, report from Ministry of War, dated 1 B 1311. 18. The play was translated and printed in Sofia by activist A. Ypi Kolonja in (Frashëri 1901). 19. There are a number of reasons why scholars have misinterpreted the play as representing a glorification of highland values. That being said, reading it in the most literal sense (and after all, it was meant to be performed on stage) suggests that this tragedy was meant to convey a clear- cut message very much in line with the Ottoman reform movement’s goals (Gawrych 2006: 15-18). 20. Some noted the state attempts to reduce the number of vendettas between communities in and around Prizren, Prishtina, and Peja (Ipek), a direct consequence of local struggles for power (Durham 1909: 112). 21. In response to the Russian military victories and recognizing that there would be serious territorial consequences, a number of organizations were formed in the later months of 1877 to lobby European powers for the return of the status quo (i.e., no territorial rewards to the Russian state). One of these organizations was the Central Committee for the Defense of the Rights of the Albanian People, founded by Istanbul-based regional intellectuals in December 1877 in Istanbul. Contrary to what most scholars read into the committee, it seems clear that its initial purpose was to protect Ottoman interests by soliciting the European public (such organizations would send open letters to newspapers), claiming that they were part of national communities operating independently from the Ottoman state (Gawrych 2006: 43–45). 22. By 1910, Bid Doda Pasha was on a “first-name” basis with Italian foreign ministry officials and a collection of his letters discussing his haggling between Italian and Austrian companies suggests he was clearly in control of his region’s resources, Archivio Storico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri (ASMAE), Ambass 220, no. 4848, Bid Doda Pasha to Llima, 3 Nov. 1910. 23. Suggestively, Prenk bib Doda Pasha’s career as both a local power holder and a future partner in the timber industry starts even earlier. Evidence found in reports coming out of Lebanon in the 1870s suggest the Austrian representatives, along with the Ministry of Mines and Forests, and prominent local Arab leaders linked to the Malhame family, were actively promoting Prenk Bib Doda for a possible appointment as the top administrator for Mount Lebanon. BBA, YA.RES 20/19, dated Vienna, 16 C 1300 [24 Apr. 1883]. Prenk Bid Doda would soon be the centre of much debate over his role as appointed Mutassarif of Lebanon to replace the deceased Vasa Paşa [Pashko Vasa], another Mirdita Catholic who set off the successful reforms of the province. 24. Indeed, family feuds based on older conflicts back in the Balkans continued to plague refugee communities in Anatolia as they were forced to resettle after the collapse of the empire’s Balkan provinces in 1912-1913.

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ABSTRACTS

This is a study of the shifting fortunes of Ottoman western Balkan regions (represented here in their main towns) at the end of imperial rule. It reads the evidence of certain internal dynamics to reconsider what are the animating forces at work during a period of state reorientation such as that of 1878 to 1918. Using the cases of the Ottoman western Balkans as extensions of broader regional interactions between (not so neatly distinctive) state and subject actors, it becomes clear that the origins of certain kinds of social upheaval are linked to local socio-economic forces directly affiliated with administrative reforms. What is often missing in early readings of these reforms is that many were adopted to harness local practices of conflict resolution. As argued throughout, the local forces engaging with presumably distinct state actors would ultimately influence new regional conditions that were often registered as indigenous principles or “values”. The manner in which state authorities tried to co-opt these local practices often proved violent. Such violence invariably appears in the documents. Where this paper seeks to go, however, is to highlight how the violence alone cannot serve as our focus to better understand how change is brought to the region. Rather, it aims to show how indigenous forms of mediating violence, often through honor codes, as in the Albanian case studied here, known as besa, we can begin to better understand the complicated intersections of institutional changes and indigenous actors.

INDEX

Keywords: Albania, violence, honor, Ottomans, folklore

AUTHOR

ISA BLUMI

Associate Professor, Georgetown University

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Building Professional and Political Communities: The Value of Honor in the Self-Representation of Ottoman Police during the Second Constitutional Period

Noémi Lévy-Aksu

1 This article focuses on the use of honor and related concepts in sources written by members of the Ottoman police forces during the Young Turk period, a period that witnessed the complete reformation of the police institution in the Empire. It argues that the concept of honor emerged as a central value around which the promotion of individual, professional and political identities was articulated. Referring to personal qualities and political values, the notion of “nâmûs” (honor) was used by the authors of textbooks, short self-narratives or longer autobiographies to legitimize both their role in the police force as well as the larger role of the institution in society. This two-fold dimension was based on the rhetoric of inclusion and exclusion alike, for it constantly juxtaposed the honorable policemen of the new regime to various groups they construed as dishonorable, including the policemen of the previous regime and the political opponents of the present. This essay aims to highlight the multi-dimensional uses of the notion of honor, investigating its social and political significance for the newly-fashioned, professional identity of the Ottoman police forces in the post-1908 era.

2 Anthropologists and their critics have long debated the concept of honor for defining and characterizing Mediterranean societies.1 The criticism against the view of honor as an anthropological and social object defining “Mediterranean culture” has led scholars to question the very relevance of the concept of the Mediterranean, and, along with it, the utility of the concept of honor and other moral concepts they consider a-historical and essentialist.

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3 Acknowledging some of the pitfalls anthropologists took for granted in addressing honor in Mediterranean cultures, scholars are revisiting the concept of honor in historical studies dealing with various geographies, including the Ottoman Empire. Separated from the emphasis on traditional and immutable cultural forms, honor has made a comeback as a means of understanding changing balances in the political and social arrangements of various states and regions throughout the modern era.2 Attempts to conceptualize historically associations among the state, society and honor have focused primarily on two spheres and their related institutions: justice and the military. Works on justice point out the fluidity of the concept and the difficulties in establishing a clear dichotomy between the traditional and the modern, or the illicit and the legal. They also investigate the role played by the notion of honor and morality in the discourses and strategies developed by the state and local actors to legitimize their positions in the community or exclude deviant individuals or groups on political and moral grounds (Peirce 2003; Tuğ 2009). As for the imbrications between governance and crime, honor has been one of the notions used by studies on paramilitary groups such as bandits to point to the convergences in the ways violence is performed and legitimized, examples of which can be found among state military forces and illegal organizations (Esmer 2009).3 The use of honor as a tool for military and social mobilization has also been studied primarily for the period of the first World War (Beşikçi 2012), although recent work has also begun to point to earlier versions of the use of honor to advance patriotic pride in the Ottoman state, for example, during the Crimean War (Badem 2010: 394-402). 4 Many of the themes and questions raised by studies of judicial and military values are also relevant for the police, an institution closely related to military and judicial institutions both in its missions and general characteristics. The question of the role that ethics and morality have played in police organization and activities has been explored by historians, sociologists and members of the police themselves in many contexts, including the Turkish one (Bal, Beren 2003). Nonetheless, at least for the Ottoman case, no work has yet investigated the moral values that the Ottoman police promoted during the period of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century reforms. My paper aims to highlight the importance of the theme of honor in the reform and legitimization of the Ottoman police at the beginning of the Young Turk era. In the pages that follow, I contend that the notion of honor, as it appears in late Ottoman police sources, was instrumental to the project of building two new communities, one political and the other professional. Defined as the common denominator characterizing the members of the police as well as their practices and relationships with the people, references to the value of honor also allowed police in the new Ottoman regime to stigmatize and exclude those they considered their enemies from different professional and political communities. This essay is an attempt to understand better the several layers of the rhetoric of inclusion and exclusion that surround the notion of honor, taking the police force of the early Young Turk period as its case study. 5 This paper focuses on discourses, and I am aware of the risks and limitations of discourse analysis, especially when discourses emanate from official sources. Nevertheless, I believe that these sources, which have until now been mostly overlooked, deserve to be taken into account for several reasons. First, their very existence has a political and institutional meaning. For the first time in its brief history,

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after 1908, the Ottoman police started to develop a public discourse of their own. This had to do with the change of regime, but there were other factors informing this new self-fashioning as well. After all, the Ministry of Justice had started to publish its official journal in 1873, the Gazette of the Courts (Ceride-i mehakim), aiming to diffuse knowledge of the new regulations and legal procedures among the members of the institution (Rubin 2011). In the case of the Ottoman police, the fact that a professional journal and textbooks started to be published during the Second Constitutional Period was not a coincidence; it rather reflected the new status which the Ottoman police started to acquire within the government marked by increased financial resources and a wider scope of jurisdiction in society (Ergut 2004: 152-228). 6 The centrality of the theme of honor in the police sources of the time also has explicit and implicit connections with some significant transformations in the political and social role of the police after the Young Turk revolution. Nobody would have expected the police officers to describe themselves as shameful or vile, and the exaltation of virtue and virility is part of the topoi used by police institutions all over the world. Nevertheless, clichés too have the potential to illuminate their historical context when their articulation to other notions and social realities allows one to move beyond the level of self-representation. In the case of the Ottoman police, I argue that the theme of honor is to be connected to the notions of accountability and political legitimacy, a new perspective on policing which emerged after the Young Turk revolution. My paper discusses the political and practical implications of these notions, which have until so far been analyzed either in terms of professionalization (Ergut 2004) or democratization (Bal, Beren 2003). 7 Finally, the discursive importance of honor in these sources points to one of the major social challenges which were faced by the police of the time: the struggle against local individuals and groups for the control of urban space. Strong-arm men and more or less organized gangs were a legacy of the Hamidian period that emerged as the main threat to public order in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution. In many cases, the trouble-makers benefited from a social and spatial integration which made them part of an “urban culture”, to follow Roger Deal’s conceptualization for the phenomenon in the Hamidian Istanbul (Deal 2010). Informed by violence and illicit behavior, this urban culture also heavily relied on the theme of honor for its hierarchical organization, use of violence and exaltation of masculinity (Lévy-Aksu 2013). The suppression of these groups was all but a smooth process in the first years of the Second Constitutional period. In this respect, the struggle on the ground was echoed by an offensive on paper. Through the political connections made by the police official sources dealing with these “dishonorable” categories, this discourse of exclusion raises the question of the borders of the professional and national communities promoted in the police sources of the time. 8 Before analyzing the way that the rhetoric of honor appeared in these late Ottoman police narratives, I will briefly contextualize these texts and their authors within the broader framework of the emergence of the Ottoman police force, which, by the mid- nineteenth century, became one of the major institutions in charge of implementing Tanzimat principles of protecting individuals, honor and property. 9 The second part of my paper will concentrate on the role of honor in the construction of a positive police identity. The value of honor was instrumental in the emergence of an Ottoman discourse on police ethics during the second constitutional era. Parallel to

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the energy invested in the professional formation of members of the police, the stress on the moral qualities necessary to form part of the police served two purposes, both marking the rupture with the turpitudes of the previous regime and simultaneously enhancing the legitimacy of the new institution, whose activities were to be shaped by the principles of the new regime. 10 In the last part of the essay, I will show that this emphasis on the value of honor was also a way to stigmatize and exclude certain groups or individuals, an aspect which, though less explicit than self-promotion, was equally central in the construction of a professional and political community in the narratives under study. I will argue that, beyond offering a literary means of emphasizing the virtue of authors confronting dangerous enemies, this negative approach to honor must also be taken into account in the evaluation of the political orientations of the late Ottoman police and its relationship with society in general during the Empire’s second constitutional period.

I. Protecting life, honor and property: police forces as newcomers into the Circle of Justice

11 The redefinition of the relationship between the Ottoman state and its subjects was at the core of the Tanzimat reforms. Through the 1839 and 1856 edicts, as well as multiple legal and administrative reforms, the political and social bases of the Ottoman regime were transformed. The details of this process, which articulated traditional Islamic and Ottoman concepts and European references, are beyond the scope of this paper. Here, I focus on the role attributed to the newly created police forces in this transformed political framework.

12 Several studies have explored the transformations that the Tanzimat reforms introduced into the mechanisms of state legitimization and the traditional “Circle of Justice” that linked the sultan to his subjects (Reinkowski 2005: 200-203; Miller 2005; Darling 2013). Most of these studies lay stress on legal reforms. The extensive reformation of the Ottoman justice system, which manifested itself through the adoption of new codes and a thorough reform of judicial procedure, offers a valuable window into the new idiom of power and law that emerged during the Tanzimat era. However, less studied than justice and law, the role of the police within this process was hardly insignificant. In charge of law enforcement and the protection of state interests and subjects’ lives and property, the police held a central position in the new mechanisms of control and surveillance over the population. Following the suppression of the Janissaries in 1826, the institutionalization of the police forces, officially created by the 1845 Polis Nizamnamesi, was a slow process only completed in the early 20th century (Alyot 1947). 13 The few brief police regulations published before the second constitutional period offer only a partial picture of the missions with which the state entrusted the police during this period. They nonetheless make clear that the police force’s main tasks pertained to the implementation, preservation and restoration of the political, social and moral order. In their various articles, the 1845, 1879, 1896 and 1907, police regulations juxtaposed and articulated several concepts closely related to public order, discipline and security, such as nizam, asayiş, emniyet, inzibat, all of which appeared in the first articles of the regulations defining the aim of police activity. The remaining articles

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provided information on the concrete meaning of those concepts as far as policing was concerned. In the 1845 regulation, the priorities of police activities were defined as the control and surveillance of the population and the prevention or suppression of social unrest and deviant behavior such as begging and gambling (Ergin 1995: 875-878). Until 1879, a unique force, with a strong military character, was in charge of policing urban and rural spaces. Initially conceived as a kind of militia whose main aim was to face the challenge of bandits and rural unrest, the zabtiye became more and more involved in civil policing and crime investigation as well, until the 1879 reforms which created a distinct ministry of Police (Zabtiye Nezareti) and a gendarmerie force under the authority of the ministry of War (Paz 2010: 170-225). 14 The regulations published under the reign of Abdülhamid II gave great importance to the defense of state interests through the surveillance and suppression of political opponents, although various aspects of social and moral control were also listed among the duties of police forces. In all of these regulations, the fight against crime was a secondary topic, only mentioned in the last article of the 1845 regulation and still in the background in texts that followed.4 Much stressed by Ferdan Ergut as a distinctive feature of the Ottoman-Turkish police, the predominance of social control over crime resolution was actually shared by most national and imperial police systems organized or reformed in the 19th century (Ergut 2004; Berlière 1993). 15 In this context, cases related to morality became one of the major fields of police intervention in Ottoman realms as well. In the absence of codes, self-narratives or pedagogical publications that might highlight the principles underlying police activity before 1908, only police reports offer insights into the concepts of order and disorder that shaped these interventions. In these laconic sources, various minor disorders are assimilated into the negation of moral values and codes. Negative expressions related to morality, such as the omnipresent uygunsuz (improper) or uygunsuzluk (impropriety), are used to stigmatize behaviors, events and individuals, ranging from drunkenness, prostitution, and indecent dress to state officials’ neglecting their duties. Many of the behaviors labeled as improper in the police reports did not constitute clear breaches of the law but were instead denounced as infringements of the social and moral order. 16 The determination of what was proper or improper was to a large extent left to the personal judgment of the local police officer. That definition made it much more flexible and open to negotiation than the letter of the law, but it also opened the door to arbitrary police abuses.5 Alongside the concept of uygunsuzluk, negative forms of words such as ahlâk (morals), adâb (good manner) and münasebet (convenience) were also omnipresent in late 19th-century police reports. They clearly demonstrate that under the reign of Abdülhamid II, the police did not only focus on the surveillance and repression of political opponents but also (indeed mostly) on the prevention and repression of the violations of an ideal, though undefined, social and moral order. 17 The Young Turk revolution did not dramatically change the general framework regulating police activities in the Empire. Although the new regime dismissed Abdülhamid II’s most infamous spies and significantly reformed the police forces in August 1909 by dissolving the Police Ministry and replacing it with the General Directorate of Security (Emniyet-i Umumiye Müdüriyeti), social and moral control remained at the core of police missions. For example, this is attested by the law on beggars and suspect individuals adopted in 1909. This law gave the police the power to apprehend and repress such individuals (Ergut 2002: 161-163). The very fact that this

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new law grouped beggars and recidivists together and criminalized them on the ground of their persons rather than their acts illustrates the blurring of the boundaries between illegality and immorality mentioned above. Because they were considered to be unattached, depraved and unproductive, beggars and repeat offenders became the objects of summary trials, expulsion, prison and even physical punishment (Ergut 2002; Özbek 2009). 18 If there were a clear continuity in the definition of the social order “defended” by the police during the Tanzimat, Hamidian and Young Turk periods, the institution gained a much more efficient means of performing its missions during the last period: the rise in the number of police and the efforts made in the professionalization of the institution through the creation of police schools, the stipulation of conditions for recruitment and advancement, as well as the rise in wages were all indications of the importance the new regime invested in the police as vectors of a greater control of society. 19 This process of professionalization had its discursive counterpart in the emergence of several kinds of publications through which the police produced a discourse about themselves and attempted to highlight and justify various aspects of their activities. In the years that followed the 1908 revolution, a police journal as well as several textbooks on the subject began to appear for use in newly established police schools. These sources provide us with insights into the perceptions and definitions of policing on the part of members of the institution, something that is missing for earlier periods. With their contents (i.e., their rhetoric and their visual materials) they help give us a better understanding of the modalities and aims of policing during this period. At the same time, they also became the vectors of a new strategy of communication that aimed to legitimize the police as an intermediary between state and society. Relying more specifically on three police textbooks published between 1910 and 1913, and two autobiographies written by police officers during this period, I argue that despite their differences in length and content, these disparate sources articulated a similar rhetoric of honor and morality which constituted the basis for their claim that members of the police were the most legitimate and efficient intermediaries between state and society in the new regime. At a time when foreign and local detective stories flourished in the Ottoman Empire, police officers who put pen to paper appear to have cared very little about appearing as the new Sherlock Holmes, preferring instead to present themselves as honorable men, guided by political and moral ideals and defending the common interests of the state and the people.6 The second part of my paper will study the use of honor in these narratives in greater detail.

II. Building professional and political communities

20 The words “nâmûs” (honor), “nâmûslu”, “nâmûskâr” (honorable) and their synonyms constitute one of the major semantic fields in police literature of the second constitutional period.7 Disparate authors’ simultaneous insistence on these concepts tells us as much about their motivations for writing such self-narratives as they do about the ideological views underlying them. Below I will analyze the professional and political implications of this centrality of honor.

21 First, in most of these texts, the notion of honor is part of a revolutionary rhetoric that aimed to stress the rupture between the shameful old regime of Abdülhamid II and the glorious constitutional present. Notable in many aspects of public life, this dual

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opposition between the past and the present is nowhere more present than in police narratives for obvious reasons. Used by Abdülhamid II to protect state interests, suppress political opponents and enhance social control, the police were one of the most criticized institutions after the 1908 revolution. While the first purges occurred at the end of the summer, both the newspapers and the parliamentary debates stressed the need for a vast reform of the institution, which would be the only way to restore its lost credibility. As mentioned above, one year later, in August 1909, the Police Ministry was replaced by a Directorate of Public Security, under the authority of the Ministry of Interior (Lévy-Aksu 2013: 165-190). The publications under study emanate from members of this reformed institution. Most can be considered official publications, since they belonged to textbooks used in newly created police schools. 22 According to those narratives, the old regime police was corrupt, brutal and unjust; put another way, they were deprived of honor, or “nâmûssuz”, as in the two following quotations: “They were the old police. In the eyes of the people they were worthless, but they behaved against the people like cold-hearted monsters, like tyrants, traitors, liars, robbers, and opportunistic creatures without any humanity, and they used the people as their slaves.”8 “The police were for me the most despicable, worthless, tyrannical and vile creatures! […] Oh, creatures without any honor [nâmûssuz mahlûklar]”.9 23 The duty of the new police was to clean the stain left on the institution, hence the desire to prove that policemen could be paragons of morality. In the sources discussed below, “honorable” policemen are almost consistently juxtaposed to police from the previous era: understanding the sacred nature of their work, refusing any kind of bribe, showing all due respects to the people, they perfectly embody the value of honor. This point was stressed by Nazif Efendi, a policeman working at the Samatya police station, inviting his fellow policemen to act “always honorable” at the end of his short self- narrative published within İbrahim Feridun’s textbook: “The only ones able to represent the law of the country, to risk their lives in all catastrophes, to ensure common tranquility and national prosperity are the police. My friends, always act honorably!”10 24 Beyond the opposition between the depravity of the past and the morality brought back by the new regime, the concept of honor also pointed to the personal qualities required by individuals eager to enter the police force. Although none of the authors denied the importance of professional formation, they all stressed that education could by no means be sufficient to create a good police officer. Courage, honesty, and fairness were described as the innate virtues required to enter and thrive in the police force. According to Hüseyin Hakkı, one should prefer that “rather than being learned, the police be of ‘excellent morality’” (hüsn-ı ahlâk sâhibi) so that they could perform their duty properly: “The police serve the country with its excellent knowledge. However, one can never assume that knowledge is sufficient to be a policeman. What is necessary and required is, together with—and even more—than knowledge, the quality of the soul and the excellence of the conscience. Ignorant people are not the only ones who can be characterized by their immorality, evilness of the soul, or mediocrity of the spirit. In order that the police may be useful and valuable for the country, rather than being learned, one must wish that they be of excellent morality”.11 25 Stress on the personal qualities, respectability and moral exemplarity of state officials had been a key aspect of reform and the development of Ottoman bureaucracy and

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state apparatuses since the Tanzimat period. Several scholars have argued convincingly that the legal reforms and adoption of new penal codes were first and foremost directed at the repression of abuses and misbehaviors of state officials, such as corruption and the disproportionate use of violence. This orientation acknowledged the crucial role of the actors of various state administrations in the legitimization of the regime and the eradication of illicit practices in society as a whole (Kırlı 2006; Miller 2005). The importance given to morality also showed itself through the codified and informal conditions of recruitment specific to each institution. The wide-spread use of recommendations and kefil (sponsors) for new recruits provided them with a certificate of morality while tightening power relationships among bureaucratic elites. In the last quarter of the 19th century, when most of the state institutions were endowed with regulations elaborating the criteria for entering such careers, “excellent morality” had become one of the standard requirements. For instance, the 1907 police regulation which listed the desired attributes of a policeman mentioned not only a man’s age or physical condition but also suggested that he should possess “excellent morality” (hüsn-i ahlâk) (Alyot 1947: 197). Similar references continued to be present in regulations issued during the Second Constitutional period, which inherited the rhetoric of morality of the previous regime and transformed the moralization of the state institutions into a political priority.

26 While praising that process of moralization, police self-narratives did not overlook the obstacles that arose in the process. According to the authors, the police force’s most pressing problem was finding honorable and respectable men. “Improper” (uygunsuz) behavior such as the disrespect of working hours or the frequenting of coffeehouses during work was denounced as manifestations of ignoble characters, which stained the image of the institution. This point shows us the limits of the rhetoric opposing the old and the new police. Moreover, certain members of new police forces had previously served as members of the Hamidian regime. Indeed, the state archives clearly show that the purges undertaken in 1908-1909 were far from systematic or comprehensive: most of the individuals purged at that time were former spies or high-ranking officers, some of whom were reintegrated into imperial forces a few months later.12 The main reasons for this low turn-over was that the police schools were not yet fully functioning, while the image of the police was still very negative, making it difficult to find competent and honest new recruits. By announcing an increase in police salaries in late 1909, the authorities attempted to make policing more attractive to worthy candidates. Yet this was only a partial answer to the recruitment problem. The transfer of officers and soldiers from the army to the police proved to be a more efficient solution. It not only provided the police with well-trained, disciplined and supposedly high-spirited recruits but also strengthened the link between the two institutions and contributing to the spread of military values among members of civil society, a major goal of Young Turk policy after 1909 (Ergut 2004: 215-228). 27 If that policy made possible a quick, quantitative rise in the numbers of enlisted police after 1909, it did not suppress the concern of the institution with the low degree of morality and sense of duty prevalent among many policemen. In this respect, the criticisms voiced by police writers previously quoted were echoed by an official stigmatization of the “black sheep” of the institution through the police journals published at the time, Polis and Polis Mecmuası. Each issue of these newspapers published a list of policemen who had displayed improper behavior while performing

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their duty. Their identities, the nature of their transgressions along with their corresponding punishments were all made public (ibid.: 241). Their most recurrent faults, —consorting with prostitutes or loose women, excessive consumption of alcohol, idle time spent in coffeehouses instead of pursuing active duty—were all couched as contradictory to the moral exemplarity required by this new generation of policemen. 28 The public stigmatization of dishonorable policemen could have given a very negative image to the institution had not it been counterbalanced by the simultaneous exaltation of the virtue of the bravest members of the police forces. Significantly, police journals introduced their heroes to their readers in a very different manner: instead of the list’s reducing individuals to their faults and penalties, the most honorable policemen were presented with their pictures and an explanatory caption. Among them, the most honored were the şehit, the policemen who had died on duty, most often while fighting brigands or robbers. Pictured within a black frame accompanied by a laudation, such brave souls were eulogized for their spirit of sacrifice and uncalculated courage.13 29 The şehit were extreme cases where the social and political role which was given by the new regime to the police resulted in self-sacrifice for the nation. However, the self- narratives of the police officers stressed that this venerable view of duty should not be the prerogative of a few individuals but rather the state of mind of all police officers: “The police who represent the rule of justice should not hesitate to die for the service of their country when necessary, or even to go alive to the tomb. This is the most sacred aspect of their duties.”14 30 Honor was the value underlying this spirit of sacrifice and, from a broader point of view, the everyday activities of common policemen, as summarized by the last sentences of police officer Nazıf’s short self-narrative: “Yes, my dear fellows! I beg you, I exhort you: always be honorable, because the police represent the honor of the police forces, the honor of the government, the honor of the nation.”15 31 The triptych mentioned here points to the author’s expectations that the police would play the role of privileged intermediaries between the state and society, an approach that has been extensively studied by social scientists working on the police in various geographical contexts during the modern period. In this respect, the theme of honor in Ottoman sources was likewise instrumental in introducing two related notions into the field of policing: accountability and political legitimization.

32 The issue of accountability was crucial in the affirmation of the rupture with the old regime and promotion of a new spirit for police activities. The idea of a double accountability of the police, to the state and legal order on the one hand and the society on the other hand, constituted a break away from the understanding of policing under the previous regime. Tied to the principle of representative government trumpeted by the new regime and considered the citizens’ right in exchange for their taxes, the notion of a social accountability of the police made all the more necessary the moral exemplarity of each policeman (İbrahim Feridun 1910: 61). Their honorable behavior and sound morals were not only to be checked by their hierarchy, but also to be appreciated by the various components of the urban fabric. This accountability went together with a redefinition of the police missions in terms of service (hizmet), a notion which covers a wide range of social interventions: finding lost children, helping the poor, protecting women walking on their own by night... According to Fedan Ergut, this

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emphasis on social missions bolstered by vigilant attention to accountability and political legitimation was a turning-point for the professionalization of the police institution in the early Young Turk period (Ergut 2004).16 Going beyond the protection of the individual and property, this conception of the police force lay on a much greater degree of interactions between the police and the individuals, to such extent that some authors used analogies with the family model to define the close link. In this context, the required honor of the policeman had much more to do with the honorability of a father than with the virility of soldier, and its connotations evoked more zeal and respectability than force or braveness. 33 Was this emphasis on social accountability and service to the people anything but a rhetorical tool used to make the institution more attractive to new recruits and more acceptable for the population? We lack primary sources to understand to what extent this professional spirit was endorsed by the policemen on the ground. It is possible to find anecdotes and instructions highlighting an increased involvement of the police forces in the service of the people (Ergut 2004: 182-184), but it is difficult to assume that they reflected everyday practices. Beyond that, the sphere of service and protection was far from including indistinctly the whole social body. On the contrary, this accountability was conceived as a duty towards deserving, respectable citizens and implied the exclusion and criminalization of the others, a dimension which I will develop more in details below. Tracing the dividing line between these two communities was one of the tasks which the police journal and textbooks assigned themselves, but the empirical nature of the police job left much space for the police members to shift the line or trace new ones when faced with concrete cases. Uncritically viewed by some authors as an Ottoman prelude to the principles of police ethics formulated in the last decades in the international arena (Bal, Beren 2003: 64-76), the emphasis on accountability was also a way for the police hierarchy to advocate and justify an increasing intervention into the everyday life of the citizens by stressing the distinct social utility of this institution.17 Central in the attempts to build a professional community, these arguments are prominently articulated in the sources under study and clearly demonstrate the political role that the police hierarchy and the government assigned to the institution. 34 Even when they were described in the service of the people, the ideal policemen pictured in the police textbooks were constantly reminded that they bore the huge responsibility to embody the state in their local environment. Beyond their policing tasks, it was through their exemplary behavior that, together with the gendarmes, the police were considered as vectors capable of carrying the modernizing and civilizing state project to the social and geographic margins of the empire. Significantly, late Ottoman police authors lingered less on their experiences solving crimes or arresting thieves than on the exemplary value of their daily behavior and activities among society. The greater the social or geographic distance of their “targets” from the center, the more this moralizing and civilizing mission grounded on their exemplary behavior was stressed. While they described their search for tax-evaders in the remote provinces of the Empire, or their experience policing the underground criminal networks of Istanbul, such writers denounced not only the illegal acts they encountered but also a whole range of disorderly and illicit behavior they suggested could be curbed by the police force’s admonitions and exemplary conduct.18 Laziness, drunkenness, consorting with prostitutes or loose women in urban contexts, or ignorance of the Turkish language and disrespect for the public good and private

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property that they attributed to Kurdish and Arab tribes were some of the moral and social evils pointed out by late Ottoman police authors who, unsurprisingly, simultaneously portrayed themselves as well-mannered, polite and full of lessons about to the proper way to behave and foster one’s integration into the Ottoman nation (Hüseyin Hakkı 1911: 18-20).19 35 In the context of the Second Constitutional period, that moral mission acquired a strong political character. Beyond compliance with the law or fulfilling the duties of any citizen, the police and the gendarmes were expected to reflect and spread the political values (freedom, equality, justice) promoted by the constitutional regime. This is, at least, the task they set themselves in their writings, which suggests that they had the power to make the transformations of the political system palpable in the everyday life of the common people, and thus, to play a part in the process of legitimizing the new regime. Hüseyin Hakkı (1911) illustrated this dimension with an anecdote in which he was personally involved. At his arrival at Havran, in the province of Syria, he was faced with the fearful and hostile people, who had lost any faith in the central power of the imperial government due to the misdeeds and abuses of the Hamidian police forces: “Because of their improper behavior, their abuses which injured the human conscience and the common sense, these policemen who performed their activities in the name of the government had destroyed all the respect and consideration people had for the government and the state”.20 36 However, after the narrator behaved mercifully to them and made a speech in which he explained the values of the new regime and the role of the gendarmes, the people immediately proclaimed their loyalty and faith in the new government: “The criminals and the women suddenly started to shout together ‘Long live to the just government’”.21 37 Needless to say, the veracity of such anecdotes is more than suspect—the organization of the narrative is closer to an apologue than to a police report, but they nonetheless constitute meaningful elements of the message their authors attempted to convey in their works. In the quoted texts, honor appears as one of the key notions that would allow the police to achieve their mission to binding subjects and instilling in them the confidence and trust of the central government. Although the semantic field of honor has a long history in the legal and political language in the Ottoman Empire, I would argue that a new dimension was added to its political meaning during the Second Constitutional period. Explicitly or implicitly, the Ottoman police writers mentioned here referred to the new challenges brought by the representative regime in terms of political legitimization. As can be seen in the last quote, in which the people celebrated “just government”, the legitimization of the sultan or of the imperial political system was no longer the only issue at stake. The honorable policemen now represented not only the state but also the government, itself the emanation of the committee that dominated the political arena.

38 Ibrahim Feridun, Hüseyin Hakkı, and Hasan Niyazi, all authors of the works quoted above, did not hide their political affiliations. They were loyal supporters of the Committee of Union and Progress, which dominated political life in the Empire after the failed counter-revolution of 1909. These men saw themselves not only as the emanation of the state but also as defenders of the Unionists, who, they argued, constituted the only legitimate and efficient force capable of defending the regime and the society against their enemies. In this respect, their choice to take up their pen to share their experiences as police officers and to encourage the new recruits and

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promote the political and moral role of the police in the new regime should be read as political acts, as part of the CUP’s larger propaganda platform launched after 1909. While promoting a view of police activity oriented towards the needs of the society rooted in exemplary behavior and interactions with the people, their writings illustrated the need to develop a political consciousness among the members of the institution that they could, in turn, inculcate to the rest of the population. 39 The politicization of the police institution and the gradual takeover of the CUP are beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say here that the Unionists did not hold a monopoly on use of the notion of honor for political ends. Its blurred and extensive definition made it a tool for different actors and institutions, with their own varying stress on the term/concept/field’s moral, religious and social dimensions. Rather than what it referred to, the political impact of honor lied in its being acknowledged as a shared value that could be used in the search for a common political idiom between the state and the different components of society. However, the increasing domination of the Unionists over the political sphere and the different institutions of the state gave a specific political tone to those publications by police officers. The legitimization of power through its honorable and devoted police force went together with the discrediting of its declared or alleged opponents, accused of perverting the political, social and moral order.

III. Separating the wheat from the chaff: the police and their “dishonorable” enemies

40 As already mentioned, in the police writings under study honor did not only work as an inclusive value. The lexical field of the positive values associated with honor was frequently counterbalanced with negations of honor: şerefsiz, nâmûssuz, edebsiz. Police writers used these counter adjectives of honor to describe, construct and condemn social categories of individuals and groups that contested or threatened public or political order. The police officials’ writings emphasize that an important aspect of police activity was to fight against “dishonorable” individuals and groups whom they denounced as enemies of the regime and the country—enemies who often inspired these men to write their stories down. The authors characterized their enemies in both moral and political terms and targeted police surveillance and repression towards these threats, an approach already prevalent during the reign of Abdülhamid II. Yet during the Second Constitutional era the targets of police action shifted, as increasing weight was put on different ethnic and national identities in articulating a dichotonomy between honorable and shameful citizens.

41 A closer study of the individuals and categories labeled as “dishonorable” elucidates the political and social dimensions of this stigmatization. Unsurprisingly, the fiercest criticisms were addressed to the individuals suspected of plotting against the new regime, especially those motivated by “conservative” (or “reactionary”) ideals. Several chapters of the book of Riza Öge, a police officer during the Second Constitutional period and the first decade of the Turkish Republic, focus on his time spent spying on and repressing the activities of supporters of the old regime as well as members of the religious opposition (Öge 1957). While he did not give much space to the subversive political activities of such individuals, the narrator devoted long passages to their physical and moral characteristics, describing them as cunning, malicious and disloyal

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as well as denouncing in particular the influence they managed to exert over the common people through their lack of modesty and ostentatious display of religiosity. In the eyes of police officers, the purported dishonor of their opponents was part and parcel of their political ambitions of undermining the regime. This made them all the more dangerous and subversive. Although the author did not explain himself well, he suggested that their resorting to feign moral values for political ends was shameful. Of course, in so doing, he ignored the fact that similar uses and abuses of morality were also at the core of the police discourse and practices of the time. 42 More direct attacks on the grounds of immorality targeted categories which all belonged to the lower classes and marginal groups of the cities: individuals who promote or solicit prostitutes, kabadayı (“strong-arm” men) or members of illegal bands (çete) active on the peripheries of the cities. Interestingly enough, women are almost absent from among those stigmatized categories. Whereas the police reports of the period attest to the recurrence of the interventions targeting women defined as “ uygunsuz” (prostitutes, ill-reputed or improperly dressed -açık saçık- women), self- narratives of members of the late Ottoman police do not deal with this issue. One possible explanation for this silence is that the confrontation with women would not have contributed to the construction of the authors’ own positive masculinity, an important aspect of the self-promotion at work in their writings: women were described as weak creatures, whether married or single, whose security and respectability was to be protected by the police, whereas, the courage and boldness of the police affirmed themselves in their struggles against male adversaries. 43 Significantly, the authors of these narratives emphasized the physical strength of their opponents, often linked to their social and/or professional background, such as the Greek kayıkçı to whom Rıza Öge devoted the third chapter of his book, or the ordinary prisoners who benefited from the amnesty conceded by the new regime in the summer 1908 and who were, according to Ibrahim Feridun, the cause of a tremendous rise of insecurity in Istanbul during the following months (İbrahim Feridun 2010 (1910): 175-176). Beyond their physical characteristics, those categories were depicted as lacking any morality and honor in their use of violence: they resorted to physical intimidation and assassinations to deter or eliminate their victims for the sake of material gain and personal prestige. Rather than violence per se, its un-codified use was the target of scathing critiques by the above-mentioned authors, who charged their adversaries with attacking unarmed individuals, ganging up in large numbers on individuals, and subverting duels through the use of hidden weapons. Such were the charges that the police writers in question hurled at various members of the urban lower-classes, with the assumption that beyond their implications in specific criminal matters such individuals constituted a permanent threat for the social and moral order, both as groups and as individuals. 44 The kabadayı and gang label on the paper was only one aspect of the struggle for the control of urban space that the police force used to bolster its moral standing. Surveillance, police operations and incarcerations/arrests were frequently attested by period newspapers and archival sources, which betrayed the ability of these individuals and groups to challenge police authority, through violence or the use of extended social networks (Lévy-Aksu 2013: 166-170). The lack of written or oral testimonies— both official as well as non-official—on how the rhetoric of dishonor was perceived or countered by its targets and other urban dwellers makes it difficult to measure how

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successful police discursive strategies were in actually cleansing urban settings from these allegedly subversive components. 45 Nevertheless, even official sources such as the police reports offer some clues that betray how this dichotomy set up between honorable policemen and dishonorable individuals did not mask the blurriness of practices on the ground, between conflict and toleration, suppression and cooperation. An extreme case testifying to the fluidity between legality and illegality, and acceptable or immoral behavior was the transformation of some individuals who were labeled as kabadayıs into police officers. The best documented case is that of Sarraf Niyazi Bey. He was one of the most famous kabadayı of the Hamidian and Young-Turk period. In 1909, he was appointed as police inspector (Serkomiser) on the main island off the coast of İstanbul, Büyükada. Several reports in the Ottoman archives note that he was charged with the task of reestablishing public order and that the terms of his appointment gave him total freedom concerning his course of action. The means used by Niyazi Bey to suppress the Greek kabadayı on the islands were typically the ones used by kabadayı in quarrels, such as fights and personal challenges between rival bands.22 Although it is not explicit in the archival material, he probably used Muslim gangs and illegal forms violence to fight the Greek gangs. By acting in such a way, he jeopardized his chances of staying in the police organization at the time of a growing codification of the duties and methods of its agents. In fact, after a shuffle in the administrative hierarchy above Niyazi Bey resulted in a visit from an inspector who found fault in his “illegal” methods in establishing order, Niyazi Bey was immediately dismissed from his position. According to Ulunay’s account, Niyazi Bey then physically attacked the inspector and returned to his former life as a kabadayı. Although Niyazi Bey is an exceptional case, documented both by official documents and second-hand narratives, it suggests that the relations between the police forces and urban gangs were more complex than the official sources generally assumed in the early Young Turk period. Indicative of a certain fluidity between these two spheres, Niyazi Bey’s case also brings to the forefront the role which the ethnic factor played in the determination of the honorable and dishonorable categories. 46 The social over-determination of the definition of dangerous groups is by no means unique to the Young Turk period nor the Ottoman context. The increasing criminalization of the lower-classes and the accusations of moral depravity which targeted them were one of the principal aspects of the process of urbanization and industrialization which took place from the late 18th century in many European and non-European countries alike. More striking in these police narratives is the combination of social, ethnic, and national criteria involved in the stigmatization of dangerous categories in an urban context. The case of the kayıkçı mentioned above offers a case in point. While he denounced the vile character and manners of two Greek brothers involved in robbery and blackmail, Rıza Öge contrasted the actions of the two men to that of a Turkish kayıkçı from Rize. He portrayed the Turkish kayıkçı throughout the chapter as a most honorable man eager to defend the nation without seeking material rewards: “I will do this job with pleasure for my country. I beg you, don’t even mention money. Since we are doing this for the honor and the dignity of the state, how could I accept money to catch that pig, it would be nonsense”.23 47 In Rıza Öge’s book, the references to the honor of the state and the nation went together with recurrent accusations against deleterious foreign influences on the

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Ottoman economy and law enforcement on the one hand and the misdeeds of Greek citizens living in the Ottoman capital on the other. Öge is an extreme case in the polarization of honor along national categories. He is also the only author whose personal narrative was not written during the Second Constitutional period but much later in 1957. His taking part in the Turkish War of Independence, during which he was seriously wounded by Greek nationalists, is presented in his preface as the turning- point of his career and his life, a reality that makes it difficult to evaluate to what extent his nationalist rhetoric and stigmatization of Greek citizens when dealing with the pre-war period reflected his true feelings at the time, or rather, their anachronistic reconstruction within the latter framework of the nationalist ideology of the Turkish Republic. One should nevertheless mention that he carefully distinguished treacherous Greek citizens (Yunanlı) from helpful Greek Ottoman subjects (Rum), whom he occasionally used as collaborators and whose taverns he frequented regularly. In this respect, his perspective fits quite well in the early stage of the Young Turk period when the stress on the nation was linked to the defense of the integrity of the Empire rather than to the condemnation of its multi-confessional and multi-ethnic character.

48 In other sources, the expressions the “honor of the nation” (nâmûs-ı millet) or the references to the “fatherland” (vatan) referred to the equality in rights and duties of all the Ottoman subjects and the genuine brotherhood which was to unify them. Take, for example, the following source from 1913: “Just as Edirne is our fatherland, Istanbul, Kurdistan, Arabistan, Rumeli, Anadolu, Trablus and all the regions are parts of our country and our fatherland [...] It means that all the Muslim, Christian, Jewish Ottomans are brothers of this fatherland [...]. There should not be any division between various elements which constitute the Ottoman nations [Turkish, Arabic, Kurdish, Laz, Albanian, Tatar, Bosnian, Circassian, Rum, Armenian, Jewish, Bulgarian, Serbian and others]; they are all the sons of one fatherland, the inhabitants of one country. The more union reigns among them, the more the country and the nation progress”.24 49 Such standard expressions of Ottomanism appeared as the official ideology promoted by these sources when defining the nation, even for the texts published in the context of the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913. The role imparted to the police forces was to maintain the integrity of the Ottoman nation through securing the lives and properties of all subjects, without any distinction of origins and through suppressing elements threatening this integrity via nationalist or separatist ambitions. The fact that none of the police textbooks published at this time mentioned the ethno-political tensions that prevailed in different parts of the Empire is surprising but can be explained in at least three respects. First, these textbooks focused mostly on the capital, Istanbul, and identified reactionary movements as the main political risk there, concentrating their attacks on the conservative and religious camps (İbrahim Feridun 2010 (1910): 177-178). Second, if we follow their arguments, the professional and political communities that they were promoting required the participation of all ethno-religious components of the Ottoman polity. Only a police institution reflecting the diversity of the nation and with a force able to speak the languages of its various members would be recognized as legitimate by the people, and therefore, be able to achieve an adequate level of control (Hasan Niyazi 1913: 44). Besides, peace between different communities was a condition for the development of police forces that were autonomous from the army but could nevertheless serve to bolster the stability of the political regime. Despite these possible justifications, one can wonder what could be the reception of these ideal views on the diversity and fraternity of the Ottoman people, which, at the time when they were

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published, were in sharp contrast both to the on-going low representation of non- Muslim communities in the police organization and the much more exclusivist nationalist stance which had been adopted by political authorities.

50 The increasing assimilation of the defense of the honor of the nation to the fight against its declared or alleged enemy is beyond the scope of this paper. The authors of the above mentioned works were transferred (or returned) to the army during the First World War. The military mobilization deprived the police forces of most of their recruits and introduced a break in the process of professionalization, which would only resume after the proclamation of the Republic. In this respect, military sources would probably be much more telling than police ones on the continuities and rupture in the official rhetoric of honor and its relationship with the concept of nation during the First World War and the Turkish War of Independence.

Conclusion

51 This analysis of sources written by members of the police in the early 1910’s highlighted two main functions in the discursive use of honor. First, honor was a key notion in the construction of a professional identity for the institution of the post-1909 Ottoman police. It enabled police officers to fashion a rupture from the corrupt and arbitrary police of the old regime in juxtaposition to a new police ethic they promoted based on the respect for the law and service to the nation and its people. From that point of view, these sources aimed to deliver a message to present and future police recruits, providing them with representations of model characters and behaviors attributed either to the authors themselves or to other members of the police. Through their texts as well as police journals published during the period, the police engaged for the first time in corporate communication. At the core of this communication was stress on the morality of the institution, pictured as a privileged career for honorable men and as a fair, impartial and efficient tool for the protection of the people.

52 However, the police sources in question did not only use honor as a tool for the reform and the cohesion of the institution. The centrality of honor in their narratives was at the same time closely related to the role they attributed to the police forces in the redefinition of state/society relationship in the constitutional regime. In their view, the police embodied better than any other social group the value of honor. They portrayed their organization as an intermediary that strengthened the ties between the central power and the people through the protection of the latter and the legitimization of the former. The political dimension of this mission attributed to the police forces is explicitly or implicitly present in all of our sources: the shift to a representative regime after 1908 introduced a new dimension to the policy of legitimization of power well studied for the Hamidian regime. The state, government, and nation were used indistinctly in these sources when they defined the police as the primary guarantor of the honor of those entities. The politicization of the police forces revealed by this kind of rhetoric was even clearer in the disqualification of the enemy of the regime as immoral and disreputable. In this respect, these late Ottoman police sources offer an interesting standpoint from which to analyze the transformations of the political and public spheres in the Empire during the early Young Turk period and the shift from an initial rhetoric of integration and connection through common values to practices of exclusion and elimination.

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NOTES

1. For an insight into the importance of the concept of honor in Mediterranean anthropology and its critics, see Albera 2006. 2. See the introduction of Tolga Esmer’s article in this special issue for an appreciation of this recent literature. 3. See also the contributions of Leslie Pierce, Başak Tuğ and Tolga U. Esmer to this special issue. 4. In this respect, police regulations follow the emphasis laid by Tanzimat legal codes on crimes against the state at the expense of crimes against individuals and property, a legal evolution which leads Ruth Miller (2005: 52-55) to consider penal codes as a central aspect of state reform and centralization during this period. 5. It also constituted a shared idiom of urban elites-notables who petitioned to the police to ask for help in the restoration of public and moral order in their neighborhoods through the expulsion of women suspected of prostitution or the closing of taverns accused of being places of excessive noise and depravations linked to the use of alcohol. 6. The Young Turk period constituted a turning point for the spread of the detective novel in the Ottoman Empire. After 1908, translations of such literature increased dramatically, and Ottoman writers such as Ebüssureya Sami, creator of Amanvermez Avni, gave their first detectives to the Ottoman literature (Üyepazarcı 2008). 7. This part is mostly based on three textbooks published between 1910 and 1913 and used in police schools: İbrahim Feridun 1910; Hasan Niyazi 1913; Hüseyin Hakkı 1911. İbrahim Feridun (1880-1938) graduated from the Imperial Military Academy (Harbiye) and started his career as a lieutenant in the Ottoman army. He taught at the academy and Police school in Istanbul during the first years of the Young Turk period. He was mobilized during the First World War, and after the end of the conflict, he retired from the army, and continued his career as an instructor in various high schools. We have less information concerning the two other authors but we learn through the forewords of their books that Hasan Niyazi was a military officer and Hüseyin Hakkı a civil official. 8. “Işte bu eski zâbıta. Ahâli nazarında hakir bir mevcûd iken kendisine kelence ahâliye karşıya emân bir kalb taşiyan bir canavar, bir zâlım, bir hâin, bir hilekâr, bir hırsız idi, fırsatı ‘ganimet bilen bu insaniyetsizler, efrâd-i ahâliyi esir gibi kullanıyor” (Hüseyin Hakkı 1911: 14). 9. “(Polis) benim için en zelîl ve en hakîr ve vâsıta-i zulm ve denâ’et bir sınıf mahlûkâttan ibâret idi[…] Ah nâmûssuz mahlûklar!” (İbrahim Feridun 2010 [1910]: 182). 10. “Kânûn-ı memleketi temsîl edecek, her felâkete göğüs gerecek, huzûr-ı ümmeti ve refâh-ı milleti takrîr ettirecek ancak (polis)dir, dâ’imâ arkadaşlar nâmûslu olunuz![…]” (Ibid.: 185). 11. “Zâbıta fâzilet-i ‘ilmiyesiyle memleketine hizmet eder. Fakat hiç bir vakit iddi‘â olunamaz ki bütün ma‘nâsıyla bir zâbıta me’mûru olabilmek için fâzilet-i ilmiye kifâyet eder. Ancak fâzilet-i ilmiye ile berâber bundan ziyâde hâslet-i rûhiye ve meziyet-i vicdâniye lâzım ve lâbüddür. Ahlâksızlık, ridâ‘et-i rûhiye, mezellet-i nefsiye cahillere münhâsır değildir. Zâbıtanın memlekette hâdim ve nâfi‘ olması için ma‘lûmâtlı olmakdan ziyâde, hüsn-ı ahlâk sâhibi bulunması arzu olunur.” (Hüseyin Hakkı 1911: 22). 12. An absence of systematic purges and their variations according to the changing political agenda of the CUP have also been emphasized for other sectors of the bureaucratic apparatus, such as the provincial governors (Sohrabi 2011: 185-213).

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13. See for example the picture of an Ottoman policeman from Izmir killed on duty by bandits in Polis Mecmuası, n° 13, 1 Rebi’ü-l-evvel 1332 [28 Jan. 1914], p. 296. 14. “Kanun-u adaleti temsil eden polis millet ifay-i hizmet uğrunda icab ederse ölmekten, diri diri mezara girmekten bile çekinmemelidir ve bu ise vezaifin en mukaddesidir.” (İbrahim Feridun 1910: 188). 15. “Evet, muhterem meslektaşlarım! Size yalvarır ve istirhâm ederek derim ki: dâ’imâ nâmûslu olunuz çünkü: (polis): nâmûs-ı zâbıtayı, nâmûs-ı hükûmeti, nâmûs-ı milleti temsîl eder.” (Ibid.: 184-185). 16. According to Ergut, the main characteristic of the shift to modern police organizations in nineteenth-century Western Europe and the post-1908 Ottoman Empire was this conception of the police as being accountable both to the state and the people, even if there were important differences in the balance between these two poles according to the nature of the political regimes and the characteristics of their societies. 17. Focusing on the case of the Law on beggars issued in 1909, Ferdan Ergut argues convincingly that the new regime sought to increase the scope of activity and decision of the police, especially in the field of social issues. In the case of beggars, the law enabled the police to decide on the idleness and social inadequacy of individuals, and to take some repressive steps without a judicial procedure. This law, which the police hierarchy claimed during an elaboration of the law in the name of efficiency, gave legal ground to practices which, to a large extent, actually pertained to the arbitrary power of the police observable in many other contexts. 18. The geographical sphere of the police’s intervention was limited to the urban areas, whereas, the gendarmes were in charge of the rest of the territory. However, the military background of many police officers had provided them with an experience in rural areas and distant provinces. 19. This derogatory approach to nomadic tribes and Eastern people of eastern Anatolia is very similar to the one pointed out by Selim Deringil for the period of Abdülhamid II (Deringil 2003: 311-342). 20. “Hükümet nâmına icrâi fa‘il ve hareket eden bu zâbıta me’mûrlarının şu uygunsuzlukları vicdân-ı beşri, hizret-i nefs-i insâniyeye cürhedâr eyleyen şu sarkıntıları yüzünden ahâli ‘indinde hükümet ve devletin aslâ bir ehemiyet ve ‘itibârı kalmamıştı” (Hüseyin Hakkı 1911: 19). 21. “Hükümete perverde eyledikleri emniyetizliğin bir i‘timâd ve itminâtı olmuştu. Gerek mücrimler ve gerek bu kadınlar hepsi birden ‘yaşasın ‘âdil hükümet’ diye bağırdılar.” (Idem). 22. BOA, ZB 492/87, 29 Kânûn-ı sânî 1324 (11 Feb. 1909); ZB 384/76, 18 Hazıran 1325 (1 July 1909). 23. “Ben bu işi bu memleketim için seve seve yaparım. Kuzum kölen olayım bana paradan puldan söz etme. Madem ki Devletin şerefi ve haysiyeti için uğraşıyoruz, ben bu domuzu yakalamak için devletten para mı alacağım, olmaz böyle şey” (Öge 1957: 42). 24. “Edirne vatanımız olduğu gibi, İstanbul, İzmir, Kürdistân, Arabistan, Rumeli, Anadolu, Trablus ve bu askam dâhilindeki memâlik toprak ve de vatanmızdır. […] Demek oluyor ki islâm, hristiyan, musevi ‘umûm- i osmânlılar yekdiğeriyle vatan kardeştirler. […] Osmânlı millet pencesini teşkil eden ‘anâsır-i muhtelif [türk, ‘arab, kürd, laz, arnavud, tatar, boşnak, çerkes, rum, ermeni, musevi, bulgar, sirb ve saire] beyninde ayrılık olmayıp hepsi bir vatanın evlâdı, bir yurdun sakinleridir. Bunlar arasında ne derece hüsn-i ufaf ve ihtihâd husûle gelirse vatan ve millet o nisbette ka’ideler görür” (Hasan Niyazi 1913: 10-11).

ABSTRACTS

This article focuses on the use of honor and related concepts in sources written by members of the Ottoman police forces during the Young Turk period, a period that witnessed the complete

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reformation of the police institution in the Empire. It argues that the concept of honor emerged as a central value around which the promotion of individual, professional and political identities was articulated. I contend that the notion of honor, as it appears in late Ottoman police sources, was instrumental to the project of building two intricate communities, one political and the other professional. Defined as the common denominator characterizing the members of the police as well as their practices and relationships with the people, references to the value of honor also allowed police in the new Ottoman regime to stigmatize and exclude those they considered their enemies from different professional and political communities. This essay is an attempt to better understand the several layers of the rhetoric of inclusion and exclusion that surround the notion of honor, taking the police force of the early Young Turk period as its case study.

INDEX

Keywords: honor, police, 2nd Constitutional Period, professionalization, legitimization

AUTHOR

NOÉMI LÉVY-AKSU

Boğaziçi University

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