Dror Ze’evi and Ehud R. Toledano (Eds.) Society, Law, and Culture in the Middle East “Modernities” in the Making Dror Ze’evi and Ehud R. Toledano (Eds.) Society, Law, and Culture in the Middle East “Modernities” in the Making Managing Editor: Katarzyna Michalak Associate Editor: Łukasz Połczyński Language Editor: Mark C. Anderson Published by De Gruyter Open Ltd, Warsaw/Berlin Part of Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Munich/Boston This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license, which means that the text may be used for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. Copyright © 2015 Dror Ze’evi, Ehud R. Toledano ISBN: 978-3-11-043974-8 e-ISBN: 978-3-11-043975-5 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. The Deutsche National- bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. Managing Editor: Katarzyna Michalak Associate Editor: Łukasz Połczyński Language Editor: Mark C. Anderson www.degruyteropen.com Cover illustration: © Kara-Keui (Galata) bridge, Constantinople, Turkey This volume is dedicated to the beleaguered, common people of the post-Ottoman Middle East, the real victims of unscrupulous leaders and intractable belief systems. May calm and peace be upon these troubled lands. Contents Acknowledgements X Introduction: Unpacking Middle East Modernities Dror Ze’evi and Ehud R. Toledano Social Transformation and the State in the Middle East 2 Part I: Unpacking Society Dror Ze’evi and Ilkim Buke 1 Banishment, Confiscation, and the Instability of the Ottoman Elite Household 16 1.1 Who Were the Pashas? 16 1.2 Households on Quicksand 21 1.3 Dismissal and Banishment 23 1.4 Confiscation Policy 27 1.5 Implications for the Ottoman Household 29 Michael Nizri 2 The Religious Endowments of Şeyhülislam Feyzullah Efendi: The Waqf Institution and the Survival of Ottoman Elite Households 31 2.1 Introduction 31 2.2 Feyzullah Efendi 33 2.3 The Ottoman Elite Household: Recruitment and Upkeep 34 2.4 The Religious Endowments of Feyzullah Efendi 36 2.5 The Contribution of the Waqf to the Survival of the Household 39 2.6 The Dynamism and Pragmatism of the Waqf 40 Tsameret Levy-Daphny 3 To be a Voyvoda in Diyarbakır: Socio-Political Change in an 18th-Century Ottoman Province 44 3.1 The Voyvoda and Voyvodalık 46 3.2 Conclusion 55 Part II: Unpacking Law and Culture Nimrod Hurvitz 4 Where Have All the People Gone? A Critique of Medieval Islamic Historiography 60 4.1 Introduction: The Lacuna 60 4.2 Historiography of the Shi`a 62 4.3 Historiography of the Madhāhib 68 4.4 Concluding Remarks 72 Guy Burak 5 According to His Exalted Ḳânûn: Contending Visions of the Muftiship in the Ottoman Province of Damascus (Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries) 74 5.1 I 74 5.2 II 76 5.3 III 79 5.4 IV 82 5.5 V 84 Avi Rubin 6 The Slave, the Governor, and the Judge: An Ottoman Socio-Legal Drama from the Late Nineteenth Century 87 6.1 Introduction 87 6.2 New Courts 89 6.3 The Trial of Ali Eşref Efendi 91 6.3.1 The Charges 91 6.3.2 Slavery and Abolition 93 6.3.3 Bezmihal 95 6.3.4 A Compassionate Judge 95 6.3.5 Governor Emin Bey 97 6.3.6 Court Investigation 98 6.3.7 Decision 100 6.4 Legal Formalism and Accountability 101 6.5 Conclusion 103 Omri Paz 7 The Policeman and State Policy: Police Accountability, Civilian Entitlements, and Ottoman Modernism, 1840–1860s 104 7.1 Introduction 104 7.1.1 The Ottoman Police 105 7.2 “Direct Access” 109 7.3 The “Nanny State” 111 7.4 Establishment of the Ottoman Police 111 7.5 Conclusion 120 Avner Wishnitzer 8 “At Approximately Eleven, Just Before Nightfall”: An Introduction to Ottoman Temporal Culture 121 8.1 Introduction 121 8.2 Reading the Clock, Alaturka or: When is Eleven O’clock Anyway? 123 8.3 Synchronizing Clocks with the Heavens 128 8.4 When Night Falls 129 8.5 How Approximate is “Approximately?” 131 8.6 The Transformation of Ottoman Temporal Culture 133 8.7 Conclusion 134 Liat Kozma 9 How to Work on Social History in the Egyptian Archives: Some Thoughts 135 9.1 Death in Alexandria 136 9.2 Histories of Archival Texts 140 9.3 Historians in the Archives 141 9.4 Historicizing the Archives 144 9.5 An Israeli Historian in Cairo 146 9.6 Epilogue 147 Bibliography 149 List of Figures 163 List of Tables 163 Index 164 Acknowledgements Some of the chapters in this volume originated in papers that students of Ehud R. Toledano presented to a colloquium in his honor at Tel Aviv University. The Editors wish to thank Dr Mira Tzoreff for her superb work in organizing the colloquium. As always, Idan Barir contributed his talents and dedication to the success of that event. Introduction: Unpacking Middle East Modernities Dror Ze’evi and Ehud R. Toledano Social Transformation and the State in the Middle East If history is an “unending dialogue between the present and the past,”1 then from our contemporary perspective, the past is bound to appear unstable, fraught with uncertainties, hard to explain in clear-cut, neatly conceived terms. Once ruled by the Ottoman sultans, the vast domains covered in this volume have in recent years expe- rienced great turmoil that set in motion processes which are far from complete and whose nature, direction, and implications are unpredictable. The series of revolutions that has been tearing apart many states in the Middle East and North Africa since the end of 2010 were preceded by the attacks of 9/11 in 2001 and the global financial crisis that has affected economies the world over from September 2008 onward. All these developments have intensified uncertainties, underlying growing doubts about our ability to understand socio-political, socio-cultural, and economic phenomena in human history; they have naturally led us to ask new questions about the past. This volume offers a fresh look at change—the driving force of history anywhere anytime. Change, as we have come to realize over generations of writing history, can be rapid and transformative, or it can be slow and incremental. Shades of different processes of change can be located between these two poles on the same continuum. Whereas some forms of change are clear and easy to detect, such as those emanating from revolutions, other forms of change occur without the awareness of the people who experience them, noticeable only after they have achieved masse critique. And, of course, there are periods when attempts to introduce change fail, as continuity predominates and structures persevere for long periods of time, appearing as stag- nation. Incidentally, regression and decline—not just progression and advance—are also forms of change, and one often leads to the other. This volume seeks to deepen and broaden our understanding of all these forms of change in a modern Middle East context. The other area in which we hope to contribute to the existing literature is open- ness to theory in the social sciences, which can provide plausible interpretations of the history of change in the Middle East and North Africa. The judicious use of insights from bodies of theoretical knowledge serves most contributors to challenge basic notions in the current discourse on the relationship between society, culture, and law. Finally, the chapters in this volume shift the focus from an external to an internal per- spective, as agency transitions from the “West” to local, Ottoman and Arab, actors in the regions discussed here. However, the shift of focus put forth in many chapters of this volume is not a total revision, nor an ambitious new interpretation of how Middle 1 E.H. Carr, What is History? (London: The Macmillan Press, second edition, 1986), 24. © 2015 Selection and editorial matter: Dror Zeevi and Ehud R. Toledano; individual contributors, their contributions. Social Transformation and the State in the Middle East 3 East and North African societies were being transformed. Rather, it is to point out the ongoing interaction between internal processes and external stimuli that produced the brands of modernity that we find in these regions. So, here we need to begin with defining, or perhaps redefining, the very notion of modernity/modernities. Among the most influential categories being deconstructed or tossed away, modernity—both in the singular and plural forms—has been a leading victim of social theory critics. But as such analytic categories fall out of grace with scholars, they are not replaced by powerful alternatives, capable of improving our understanding of crucial processes, or even in identifying new, undetected movements in history. Rather, we keep getting soft power-type substitutes, which hesitantly offer partial nar- ratives with very limited, unambitious explanatory efficacy. Although history is not supposed to be predictive, having failed to even insinuate the likelihood of a global financial quagmire or an Arab Spring/Islamic Winter, it has left historians modestly cautious about their ability to explain the transformations that did occur during the long nineteenth century in the Ottoman Middle East and North Africa. Frederick Cooper has masterfully reduced to virtual rubble the power of “moder- nity/modernities”, “modernism” and “modernization” to make sense of what took place in both European and non-European societies since the Enlightenment and the rise of capitalism and colonialism.2 From Talcott Parsons through Daniel Lerner, Wilbert Moore, W.W. Rostow, David Apter, Daniel Bell, and Charles Taylor, to their subaltern and post-colonial critics, such as Partha Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrab- arty, Cooper traces the way modernity was constructed, used, and de-constructed.3 He convincingly argues that a major part of the problem is that the category has been conceived as a “package,” or “a bundle of social, ideological, and political phenom- ena whose historical origins lie in the West.”4 These were supposed both to reflect actual realities and to act as “causal agent” for change, or to serve as both analytic and normative categories.