Reading Clocks, Alla Turca

Reading Clocks, Alla Turca PDF Author: Avner Wishnitzer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022625772X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Reading Clocks, Alla Turca explores the technological and social aspects of Ottoman temporal culture, where religious and secular powers competed and colluded for authority, the army tried to rationalize its systems of training and communication, and schoolboys complained about how long classes were. The conflicts that played out on the field of temporal systems were not along the axes one might expect, with secular, urban, rationalist, modernizing, and Europeanizing forces arrayed against rural, traditional, religious, and nationalist people and parties. Rather, religious institutions saw the rationalization of temporal culture as a way to extend their authority (the muezzin s call to prayer was the traditional way of counting the hours of the day, after all), and urban elites proclaimed their nationalism and their religiosity by their watches, both timepiece and jewelry. The image of Europe was, in a mirror of European Orientalism, deployed as both a rationalist model to be emulated (by, for example, the military) and a negative model of lazy and late aristocratic carelessness (by government administrators). Exploring sources as varied as lyric poetry, military manuals, school and military memoirs, and ferry timetables, Avner Wishnitzer lays out the full richness of Ottoman temporal culture in the nineteenth century."

Reading Clocks, Alla Turca

Reading Clocks, Alla Turca PDF Author: Avner Wishnitzer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022625772X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Get Book Here

Book Description
Reading Clocks, Alla Turca explores the technological and social aspects of Ottoman temporal culture, where religious and secular powers competed and colluded for authority, the army tried to rationalize its systems of training and communication, and schoolboys complained about how long classes were. The conflicts that played out on the field of temporal systems were not along the axes one might expect, with secular, urban, rationalist, modernizing, and Europeanizing forces arrayed against rural, traditional, religious, and nationalist people and parties. Rather, religious institutions saw the rationalization of temporal culture as a way to extend their authority (the muezzin s call to prayer was the traditional way of counting the hours of the day, after all), and urban elites proclaimed their nationalism and their religiosity by their watches, both timepiece and jewelry. The image of Europe was, in a mirror of European Orientalism, deployed as both a rationalist model to be emulated (by, for example, the military) and a negative model of lazy and late aristocratic carelessness (by government administrators). Exploring sources as varied as lyric poetry, military manuals, school and military memoirs, and ferry timetables, Avner Wishnitzer lays out the full richness of Ottoman temporal culture in the nineteenth century."

Reading Clocks, Alla Turca

Reading Clocks, Alla Turca PDF Author: Avner Wishnitzer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022625786X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Up until the end of the eighteenth century, the way Ottomans used their clocks conformed to the inner logic of their own temporal culture. However, this began to change rather dramatically during the nineteenth century, as the Ottoman Empire was increasingly assimilated into the European-dominated global economy and the project of modern state building began to gather momentum. In Reading Clocks, Alla Turca, Avner Wishnitzer unravels the complexity of Ottoman temporal culture and for the first time tells the story of its transformation. He explains that in their attempt to attain better surveillance capabilities and higher levels of regularity and efficiency, various organs of the reforming Ottoman state developed elaborate temporal constructs in which clocks played an increasingly important role. As the reform movement spread beyond the government apparatus, emerging groups of officers, bureaucrats, and urban professionals incorporated novel time-related ideas, values, and behaviors into their self-consciously “modern” outlook and lifestyle. Acculturated in the highly regimented environment of schools and barracks, they came to identify efficiency and temporal regularity with progress and the former temporal patterns with the old political order. Drawing on a wealth of archival and literary sources, Wishnitzer’s original and highly important work presents the shifting culture of time as an arena in which Ottoman social groups competed for legitimacy and a medium through which the very concept of modernity was defined. Reading Clocks, Alla Turca breaks new ground in the study of the Middle East and presents us with a new understanding of the relationship between time and modernity.

As Night Falls

As Night Falls PDF Author: Avner Wishnitzer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108934390
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
In a world that is constantly awake, illuminated and exposed, there is much to gain from looking into the darkness of times past. This fascinating and vivid picture of nocturnal life in Middle Eastern cities shows that the night in the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire created unique conditions for economic, criminal, political, devotional and leisurely pursuits that were hardly possible during the day. Offering the possibility of livelihood and brotherhood, pleasure and refuge; the darkness allowed confiding, hiding and conspiring - activities which had far-reaching consequences on Ottoman state and society in the early modern period. Instead of dismissing the night as merely a dark corridor between days, As Night Falls demonstrates how fundamental these nocturnal hours have been in shaping the major social, cultural and political processes in the early modern Middle East.

The Time of Turāth

The Time of Turāth PDF Author: Harald Jacob Viersen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110984385
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 486

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Book Description


Labors of Love

Labors of Love PDF Author: Susanna Ferguson
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503640345
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
How to raise a child became a central concern of intellectual debate from Cairo to Beirut over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Intimately linked with discussions around capitalism and democracy, considerations about women, gender, and childrearing emerged as essential to modern social theory. Arab writers, particularly women, made sex, the body, and women's ethical labor central to fending off European imperial advances, instituting representative politics, and managing social order. Labors of Love traces the political power of motherhood and childrearing in Arabic thought. Susanna Ferguson reveals how debates around raising children became foundational to feminist, Islamist, and nationalist politics alike—opening up conversations about civilization, society, freedom, temporality, labor, and democracy. While these debates led to expansions in girls' education and women writers' authority, they also attached the fate of nations to women's unwaged labor in the home. Ferguson thus reveals why women and the family have been stumbling blocks for representative regimes around the world. She shows how Arab women's writing speaks to global questions—the devaluation of social reproduction under capitalism, the stubborn maleness of the liberal subject, and why the naturalization of embodied, binary gender difference has proven so difficult to overcome.

Sacred Place and Sacred Time in the Medieval Islamic Middle East

Sacred Place and Sacred Time in the Medieval Islamic Middle East PDF Author: Talmon-Heller Daniella Talmon-Heller
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474460992
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This book offers a fresh perspective on religious culture in the medieval Middle East. It investigates the ways Muslims thought about and practiced at sacred spaces and in sacred times through two detailed case studies: the shrines in honour of the head of al-Husayn (the martyred grandson of the Prophet), and the holy month of Rajab. The changing expressions of the veneration of the shrine and month are followed from the formative period of Islam until the late Mamluk period, paying attention to historical contexts and power relations. Readers will find interest in the attempt to integrate the two perspectives synchronically and diachronically, in a discussion of the relationship between the sanctification of space and time in individual and communal piety, and in the religious literature of the period.

On Time

On Time PDF Author: On Barak
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520276140
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
In this pioneering history of transportation and communication in the modern Middle East, On Barak argues that contrary to accepted wisdom technological modernity in Egypt did not drive a sense of time focused on standardization only. Surprisingly, the introduction of the steamer, railway, telegraph, tramway, and telephone in colonial Egypt actually triggered the development of unique timekeeping practices that resignified and subverted the typical modernist infatuation with expediency and promptness. These countertempos, predicated on uneasiness over “dehumanizing” European standards of efficiency, sprang from and contributed to non-linear modes of arranging time. Barak shows how these countertempos formed and developed with each new technological innovation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, contributing to a particularly Egyptian sense of time that extends into the present day, exerting influence over contemporary political language in the Arab world. The universal notion of a modern mechanical standard time and the deviations supposedly characterizing non-Western settings “from time immemorial,” On Time provocatively argues, were in fact mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing.

The Christian Invention of Time

The Christian Invention of Time PDF Author: Simon Goldhill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009080830
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 517

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Book Description
Time is integral to human culture. Over the last two centuries people's relationship with time has been transformed through industrialisation, trade and technology. But the first such life-changing transformation – under Christianity's influence – happened in late antiquity. It was then that time began to be conceptualised in new ways, with discussion of eternity, life after death and the end of days. Individuals also began to experience time differently: from the seven-day week to the order of daily prayer and the festal calendar of Christmas and Easter. With trademark flair and versatility, world-renowned classicist Simon Goldhill uncovers this change in thinking. He explores how it took shape in the literary writing of late antiquity and how it resonates even today. His bold new cultural history will appeal to scholars and students of classics, cultural history, literary studies, and early Christianity alike.

The Diffusion of “Small” Western Technologies in the Middle East

The Diffusion of “Small” Western Technologies in the Middle East PDF Author: Uri M. Kupferschmidt
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110777304
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
In recent years we have become interested in the diffusion of “small” Western technologies in the countries of the Middle East during the 19th and 20th centuries, the era of Imperialism and first globalization. We postulated a contrast between “small” and “big” technologies. Under the latter category we may understand railway systems, electricity grids, telegraph networks, and steam navigation, imposed by foreign powers or installed by connected local entrepreneurs. But many “small” Western technologies, such as sewing machines, typewriters, pianos, eyeglasses, and similar consumer goods, which had been developed and manufactured in Europe and America, were wanted, and willingly acquired by the agency of individual users elsewhere. In a few cases, however, the inventions had to be adapted, or were overstepped, and even delayed. Some were adopted as social markers or status symbols only by elites who could afford them. Processes of adoption and diffusion therefore differed according to cultural settings, preferences, and needs. Social and cultural historians, and social scientists, not only of the Middle East, will find in this collection of essays a new approach to the impact of Western technological inventions on the Middle East.

The Orientalist Karl Süssheim Meets the Young Turk Officer İsma’il Hakkı Bey

The Orientalist Karl Süssheim Meets the Young Turk Officer İsma’il Hakkı Bey PDF Author: Jan Schmidt
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004366172
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 572

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Book Description
The book consists of transcriptions and summary translations of two texts in, mostly, Ottoman Turkish, the first of which is the recently discovered second volume of the diary of the German orientalist Karl Süssheim, covering the years 1903-08 which he mostly spent in Istanbul. The second text is a printed memoir of a Young Turk officer called İsma’il Hakkı, in which the latter discusses his life, political engagement and the resulting problems. Süssheim met İsma’il Hakkı in Cairo in 1908 and kept in contact with him later. The texts offer a lively picture of Istanbul and Cairo in the early years of the 20th century, the repressive regime of Sultan Abdulhamid II and the heady days of the Young Turk revolution of July 1908.