{"id":16219,"date":"2022-07-25T00:01:04","date_gmt":"2022-07-25T00:01:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parisinstitute.org\/?p=16219"},"modified":"2023-12-15T10:08:21","modified_gmt":"2023-12-15T10:08:21","slug":"gender-sex-and-printing-press-in-ottoman-constantinople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parisinstitute.org\/gender-sex-and-printing-press-in-ottoman-constantinople\/","title":{"rendered":"Gender, Sex, and Printing Press in Ottoman Constantinople"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Image from\u00a0Han\u00e7erli Hikaye-i Garibesi<\/em> (1851-52)<\/h4>

Gender, Sex, and Printing Press in Ottoman Constantinople<\/span>
<\/strong><\/h1>

by David Selim Sayers<\/a> (Paris, France)<\/p>

EVER<\/strong><\/span> since learning Ottoman Turkish nearly twenty years ago, I have been beguiled by the gender world of Ottoman Constantinople1<\/a><\/sup> and the complete alternative it offered to everything I thought I knew about gender up to that point. In 2017, I published a study of this world based on its depiction in the Tifli Stories, a particular genre of Ottoman popular fiction. My goal was to give an outline of urban gender culture as it existed roughly from the 16th<\/sup>\u00a0to the 18th<\/sup>\u00a0century, that is, before the Ottomans started engaging with 19th<\/sup>-century Western ideas.2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>

Ironically, though, most of my sources themselves were from the 19th<\/sup> century, and they had as much to say about the changes in that era as about the status quo ante<\/em>. So, following my 2017 article, I gave a number of talks3<\/a><\/sup> and courses in which I used the Tifli Stories to explore these changes, and particularly how they had been expressed and promoted through different print technologies. The piece you are reading now is the outcome of these occasions; if it leaves you curious for more, you can read the 2017 article here<\/a>.<\/p>

Interpretations of Change<\/strong><\/h3>

If there is a poster child for the gender world of Ottoman Constantinople before the 19th<\/sup> century, it has to be the boy-beloved. Appearing in all sorts of sources from court records to poetry, he is a refined, witty, and pretty boy, usually of humble origins, who serves, in urban culture, as a universal object of desire. Pursued by women and men, elders and peers, wealthy and poor alike, he points to an understanding of desire that transcends not only boundaries of social status, but also of gender and age. Bartering sexual favors, chasing after prostitutes4<\/a><\/sup> and odalisques,5<\/a><\/sup> and provoking the most brazen disputes, he points to an understanding of sexuality that is hard to reconcile with today\u2019s notions of romance, respect, and taboo. In brief, the boy-beloved and his gender world offer us many challenges, not all of them, I imagine, equally welcome.6<\/a><\/sup><\/p>

\"\"<\/h4>

The boy-beloved with older men (Han\u00e7erli Hikaye-i Garibesi<\/em>, 1851-52)<\/h4>

This feeling of discomfort and unease is nothing new. In Constantinople itself, it surfaced in the 19th<\/sup> century, when intellectual elites who engaged with the Great Powers7<\/a><\/sup> started noting the negative depictions of \u201cOriental\u201d gender and sexuality proliferating in the Western (notably French, English, and German) imagination. Such depictions presented the gender world of the Oriental Other as unnatural, immoral, and unjust, thereby serving to reinforce imperialist ambitions abroad (we must rule them since they are not fit to rule themselves) and heteronormative ideals at home (we must demonstrate our superiority by not behaving like them).8<\/a><\/sup><\/p>

In response to this hostile othering process, so the going scholarly thesis, Western (read heteronormative) gender norms were adopted across a variety of Middle Eastern contexts. This, of course, happened as part of a more general trend towards \u201cWesternization,\u201d a trend ranging across all aspects of life from medicine to the military, literature to philosophy, architecture to fashion to the calculation of time itself. It is easy to explain this trend as a sort of defensive reflex, or as a desire to \u201ccatch up\u201d with rival powers whose political, economic, and cultural trajectories were seen as a mounting threat. But we should beware of simply casting the issue in a defensive or competitive light. A genuine faith in the 19th<\/sup>-century ideology of progress, coupled with a genuine admiration for whoever or whatever seemed to represent said progress, was equally at play.<\/p>

We should also keep in mind the bigger picture that, throughout history, Constantinople has been defined as much by its capacity for change as for constancy. The city\u2019s remarkable geographic centripetality demands a receptivity to influences from literally all directions, influences that, once received, are transformed into something uniquely Constantinopolitan. This was well noted by Constantine the Great when he made the city the capital of Christian Rome in 330, and equally by Mehmed the Conqueror when he made it the capital of Muslim Rome in 1453.9<\/a><\/sup><\/p>

It is before this background that we can read the (in)famous proclamation by Ottoman statesman and reformer Ahmed Cevdet Pa\u015fa, who wrote in his Ma\u2019r\u00fbzat<\/em>, a 19th<\/sup>-century Ottoman history commissioned by Sultan Abdulhamid II (r. 1876-1909):<\/p>

Women-lovers multiplied while boy-beloveds decreased in number. The People of Lot were seemingly swallowed by the earth. The love and inclination towards young men, which had been a famous and habitual part of Istanbul life, was transferred to girls, as should be the case by nature.10<\/a><\/sup><\/h4><\/blockquote>

We can already discern the deep Western influence on Ahmed Cevdet\u2019s thinking in the way he phrases the issue. First, there is the binary, either\/or fashion in which he contrasts the \u201cinclination towards young men\u201d with that towards \u201cgirls.\u201d Then, there is the concept of \u201cnature,\u201d which he invokes, in line with 19th<\/sup>-century Darwinian (and Victorian) thinking, to suggest that something (not explicitly named as, but implied to be) \u201cunnatural\u201d has been replaced with something \u201cnatural,\u201d namely heterosexual desire as the only form of sexual desire justified by species propagation.<\/p>

But Ahmed Cevdet also decorates the passage with a Quranic reference, mentioning the \u201cPeople of Lot,\u201d who, according to the Quran, \u201capproach males [\u2026] and leave what your Lord has created for you as mates\u201d and are punished for their transgression by God who makes \u201cthe highest part [of their city] its lowest\u201d and rains \u201cupon them stones of layered hard clay.\u201d11<\/a><\/sup> Both \u201cswallowed by the earth\u201d and \u201cmaking the highest part its lowest\u201d can be read as earthquake references, enabling Ahmed Cevdet to rhetorically square the circle of (Western) social progress and (Islamic) divine justice.<\/p>

While 21st<\/sup>-century scholarship on gender in the Middle East does not necessarily confirm the apocalyptic abruptness of this change as pronounced by Ahmed Cevdet, it nonetheless reaffirms his basic contention of change in its broad strokes. Here is Khaled El-Rouayheb, writing in 2005 on the Arab-speaking world:<\/p>

Between the middle of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, the prevalent tolerance of the passionate love of boys was eroded, presumably owing\u2014at least in part\u2014to the adoption of European Victorian attitudes by the new, modern-educated and westernized elite.12<\/a><\/sup><\/h4><\/blockquote>

And here, writing in the same year on the Iranian context, is Afsaneh Najmabadi:<\/p>

A sense of pleasure, which saw both handsome young men and beautiful young women as objects of desire, [was] reeducated and disciplined into heteronormativity by the end of the nineteenth century.13<\/a><\/sup><\/h4><\/blockquote>

As we can see, things have become somewhat more nuanced since Ahmed Cevdet. El-Rouayheb, while sticking to the geological metaphor, at least shifts it from earthquake to erosion, and Najmabadi points beyond the boy\/girl-love binary by allowing for a \u201csense of pleasure\u201d that could potentially encompass both. Still, all three passages suggest that the change was monolithic (culture changed as a whole), linear (culture changed in a single, specific direction), and complete (culture reached an end point where one gender world had been replaced by another). It is these three assumptions that I would like to erode here.<\/p>

I will do so by demonstrating that the Tifli Stories published in the 19th<\/sup> century display a variety of gender norms, and that this variety has less to do with change over time than with coexisting, competing print technologies. A traditional, complex but coherent gender world, well-established prior to the 19th<\/sup> century, found expression via the print technology of lithography. At the same time, there was a revisionist engagement with this gender world, influenced by 19th<\/sup>-century Western ideas, via the print technology of typography. These two trends ran parallel to each other within the same genre, and even though typography appears to have outlasted lithography, it never \u201creplaced\u201d the latter with a new, coherent worldview, even one as broadly defined as \u201cheteronormativity.\u201d<\/p>

Print Technologies<\/strong><\/h3>

The printing press was known and used among Jewish and Christian communities in the Ottoman Empire from the late 15th<\/sup> century onwards.14<\/a><\/sup> However, printing in Arabic letters or the Turkish language was banned until 1729, when unique permission was granted to Ibrahim M\u00fcteferrika, an Ottoman civil servant of Transsylvanian\u2014and Unitarian\u2014origin,15<\/a><\/sup> to establish a typography press producing non-religious texts in Ottoman Turkish. M\u00fcteferrika only published 17 titles, and the Ottoman Turkish printing press remained a mere curiosity until about a century later.<\/p>

The Ottoman \u201cfailure\u201d to adopt the printing press in any significant way prior to the 19th<\/sup> century is an oft-cited example of the empire\u2019s \u201cbackwardness\u201d vis-\u00e0-vis Europe. There are a variety of reasons for this supposed failure. One involves a blend of economic and artistic considerations. Manuscript production had spawned an entire industry with its own supply chains spanning the breadth of the empire and beyond; its own guilds of craftsmen including scribes, illustrators, and binders; and its own forms of high artistic expression, most notably calligraphy and miniature painting. For a long time, this economic-artistic complex was able to stand its ground against the artlessly efficient printing press.16<\/a><\/sup><\/p>

Then, there was the matter of content. As evident from M\u00fcteferrika\u2019s limited mandate, the printing of religious material was banned. This was partly because the production of religious texts\u2014above all the Quran, which is, to Muslims, the literal word of God, but also legal texts, which are, as part of the sharia, religious texts themselves\u2014demanded a degree of precision not afforded by the error-prone typesetting process.<\/p>

Much more pressing, though, was the question of state control over the production and dissemination of politically sensitive material. The religious and political fragmentation wrought by the Reformation in Europe, and the role of the printing press in this process, was not lost on the Ottomans. M\u00fcteferrika himself, a staunch opponent of the Catholic Church whose home town of Kolozsv\u00e1r featured the foremost Unitarian printing press of its day, was predictably positive about the impact of the printing press.17<\/a><\/sup> But this sentiment was hardly shared by his Ottoman overlords, who had a record of closing non-Muslim presses on their soil if they seemed to be fomenting sectarian strife.18<\/a><\/sup><\/p>

There is a tendency to look back on the printing press, and other retrospectively and teleologically labeled \u201cachievements\u201d and \u201cmilestones\u201d of history, as if they had also been viewed as such at the time. This obscures how extremely controversial\u2014not to mention extremely destructive\u2014these \u201cachievements\u201d often were when they first came about: if the printing press facilitated the Reformation, it also facilitated the Thirty Years\u2019 War, which is thought to have eradicated at least a quarter of the population in German-speaking Europe alone.19<\/a><\/sup> Viewed in this light, the \u201cfailure\u201d of the Ottoman state to adopt the printing press could actually be read as a remarkable success, one that helped to preserve unity\u2014and peace\u2014in the empire until the 19th<\/sup> century.<\/p>

By then, the Ottomans had come to regard printing as an inevitability, and technological innovation had made it possible to avoid at least some of its pitfalls. In 1789, a new print technology by the name of lithography had been invented in Bavaria with the purpose of reproducing engraved images. Lithography was never intended as a replacement for typography, but that is exactly how the Ottomans used it. The technology enabled a scale of production and dissemination simply not possible with manuscripts, each of which was literally copied out by hand. At the same time, though, lithography preserved certain artistic features of the manuscript, most importantly the calligraphy, and also the accuracy that came with calligraphy but was compromised in typography.<\/p>

\"\"An elaborately produced lithography text (Han\u00e7erli Hikaye-i Garibesi<\/em>, 1851-52)<\/h4>

Finally, since lithography made it much easier to incorporate images, many lithography prints were illustrated, just as certain manuscripts contained miniature paintings. But while the high art of miniature painting was reserved for prestigious and expensive works that were only accessible to the elite, the less artful lithography prints brought picture books to the people. Overall, then, lithography enabled a sort of compromise between the artistic integrity of the manuscript and the popular reach of the printed book\u2014with the caveat that the overwhelming majority of the population was illiterate and would, at best, have had such books read out to them. By using lithography in this way, the Ottomans succeeded in innovatively adapting cutting-edge technology to local circumstances and needs.<\/p>

From the 1860s onwards, with the establishment of the first popular newspapers in Constantinople, typography started crowding out lithography. Newspapers\u2019 frequency of appearance and in-built obsolescence rendered typography the only feasible means of production. Many printers opened or switched to typography presses to meet the demands of newspapers and periodicals, which, in turn, started publishing books, pamphlets, and other printed material as well.20<\/a><\/sup> Eventually, even commissions more suited to lithography would have gone to typography presses since these were more common and therefore cheaper. Lithography books, then, were the LPs of their day and typography books the CDs, marginalizing the former not thanks to superior quality but simply thanks to affordability and convenience of production.<\/p>

However, the difference between lithography and typography was one of content as much as form. Lithography didn\u2019t just preserve certain formal characteristics of the manuscript; it also preserved the texts contained in specific manuscripts. Many lithography books are simply reproductions of pre-existing manuscripts, featuring the exact same text as the original, whether that original dates from the 19th<\/sup> century or earlier. In that sense, lithography books offer a continuation not only of the manuscript tradition, but also of the culture expressed through that tradition.<\/p>

This was not the case with typography. The Ottoman newspapers ushering in the age of typography were founded by people like Ibrahim \u015einasi, Nam\u0131k Kemal, and Ahmed Midhat, entrepreneurs and popular writers who were also public intellectuals with a reformist bent. They cared not only about how they published, but also about what they published, hoping to reform Ottoman culture with their interpretations of Western ideas. Consequently, typography stood for a radically different kind of culture, a different kind of message, than lithography.<\/p>

With both lithography and typography, then, we could indeed claim that the medium was the message. When a 19th<\/sup>-century Constantinopolitan Muslim strolled across the courtyard of a major mosque, where book vendors would set up their stalls on Fridays around prayer time, they would have known just by its printing technique, apparent from the cover, whether they were likely to be interested in a particular book or not, and what kind of discourse the book was likely to contain. They could have dismissed out of hand\u2014and many probably did\u2014either lithography or typography based on their political and cultural leanings.<\/p>

In closing, it is worth stressing that the more traditional technology of typography was used for more innovative discourses while the more innovative technology of lithography served more traditional ones. And it is equally worth stressing that the technical victory of typography does not imply a discursive one. Typography carried the day because it was technically more convenient, not because it was discursively more convincing. If lithography had become largely obsolete by the end of the 19th<\/sup> century, this does not necessarily mean that the discourses it embodied had suffered the same fate.<\/p>

The Tifli Stories<\/strong><\/h3>

I have defined and described the Tifli Stories at length elsewhere;21<\/a><\/sup> we could sum them up as an Ottoman version of the penny dreadfuls. Set in Constantinople during the reign of Sultan Murad IV (r. 1623-1640), they feature the sultan and his court entertainer, T\u0131fli Ahmed \u00c7elebi (d. 1660), in supporting roles. The stories revolve around local settings; adventure plots with plenty of sex, intrigue, and violence; and everyday urban characters pursuing mundane goals such as wealth, status, and sexual gratification. They rarely take recourse to the supernatural and can be considered one of the first indigenous proto-realist prose genres in Ottoman fiction.<\/p>

I will not claim to have \u201cdiscovered\u201d the Tifli Stories; scholars had mentioned specific stories before, and a handful had even talked about them as a group. But in 2013, I published the first book devoted to them,22<\/a><\/sup> a book that defined them as a literary genre and included Turkish transliterations of all extant stories, some of them seen for the first time since the Ottoman Empire. I have continued to draw on the stories for my subsequent work on Ottoman culture, and as my views evolve in conversation with cohorts of students and colleagues across disciplines, I keep discovering new aspects to them and challenging my own previous readings of them.<\/p>

Such is the beauty of Ottoman Studies: The field is so utterly neglected, and most of the research in it so utterly pedestrian, that with a bit of wit, work, and wherewithal, you can unearth entire genres that no one since the empire has talked about. A scholar of, say, English or French literature can only dream of getting \u201cfirst look\u201d at a text, leave alone a whole genre, that has not already been analyzed to death by wave after wave of modern scholarship. But sadly, this dearth of serious attention has also led to the field being infested with utter mediocrities who, rather than foray into the vast possibilities before them, have been content to cluster in cliques that produce uninspired, derivative work; keep the field locked up against inquisitive intruders; and divvy up its resources among themselves.23<\/a><\/sup><\/p>

The Tifli Stories have their origins in oral culture\u2014which includes manuscripts, since these were largely produced for oral recitation rather than silent, individual reading.24<\/a><\/sup> Whether read out loud from written texts or recreated on the spot, the genre was in circulation among the urban storytellers of Constantinople, notably the meddah<\/em>s,25<\/a><\/sup> presumably since the days of T\u0131fli Ahmed \u00c7elebi himself. Still, there is no proof that our extant stories were originally told by T\u0131fli; rather than constituting a fixed body of texts, they are part of a folkloric and collective tradition whereby each retelling is a reinvention, free to diverge from previous retellings and adapt the story in whatever way it sees fit.<\/p>

The 19th<\/sup>-century stories we will be looking at here are very much part of this dynamic and emergent tradition. Even though they were printed and sold as commercial products, they are not bound by modern considerations of authorial attribution or copyright. Most of their authors are anonymous, and some of the same stories were rewritten and reprinted in different versions using different print technologies over the course of the century. Overall, we have five different stories printed a total of eight times:<\/p>