BY THE NINETEENTH century, Christian Europeans had begun to perceive of the Ottomans as a dynasty corrupted by luxury and decadence. In their view, the empire was the ‘sick man of Europe’. As Central and Western European powers grew in global dominance and prestige opposite the empire, they no longer admired what they had earlier feared, and they began to view the Ottomans as inferior. From the fourteenth century through the seventeenth century, Central and Western Europe had generally dreaded ascendant Ottoman military power. As the Ottoman military threat to Central Europe waned by the eighteenth century, Christian Europeans viewed the Ottomans as paragons of culture and refinement and as patrons of magnificence and the arts. But by the nineteenth century, which corresponded to the rise of Western European colonial strength and dominance over parts of the Middle East, the Christian Europeans had begun to view themselves as preferable in every way.
The Western European approach to Muslim-majority regions such as the Ottoman Empire has been labelled as Orientalism, a proto-Islamophobia. Orientalism was Christian Europe’s contrasting image of the Eastern ‘other’, based on the comparison made between the allegedly superior colonising Occident and the supposedly backward colonised Orient. The Eastern other was everything the Western ‘self’ imagined itself not to be: lazy, ignorant, obscurantist, and religiously fanatic, yet sensuous and erotic. In many popular Orientalist paintings, the male artists—many of whom had never been to the Middle East or who used English women as models—represented the Ottoman Empire as an exotic, romantic fantasyland full of oppressed, veiled, yet nude women, where life had not changed since biblical times. Tied to the way Western Europeans imagined the empire was the way the West dealt with the East. As Westerners began to rule over former parts of the Ottoman Empire such as Algeria and Egypt, Orientalism expressed increasing Western European dominance and authority over the region.1
In the nineteenth century, across the European empires, rigid rules against mixing between groups, enforcement of social hierarchies based on race, and policies centred on the civilising mission predominated. The Ottoman Empire partook in this global trend. The Ottoman elite adopted a similar approach as other European empires to its own subject peoples in the age of imperialism. Just as Western Europeans made the distinction between Ottomans and Europeans more firmly at this time, so, too, did the Ottomans internalise Orientalist views and draw sharper lines between themselves and the people they ruled. The Ottoman elite became obsessed with their exotic image in the West and denigrated those groups that contributed to it.
In the nineteenth century, Western imperialists did not have a monopoly on prejudiced and racialised views of the governed. Ottomans sent to rule outlying provinces could be just as Orientalist as their Western counterparts. Already in the sixteenth century Ottoman Muslim intellectuals such as the disgruntled historian Mustafa Ali—who had diagnosed the decline of the empire as caused by a turn away from staffing the administration with Ottoman Rûmis—disparaged Kurds and Turks. He described them as unfit to rule themselves or others, depicting them as simpletons easily won over by flattery and gifts of uniforms, horses, and weapons, yet also untrustworthy, potentially disloyal, and morally bankrupt. In the nineteenth century, Ottoman Muslim travel writers and administrators sent from Istanbul to the Albanian and Arabophone peripheries of the empire depicted Albanians, Arabs, Bedouin, and nomads inhabiting such regions as Arabia, Lebanon, Libya, Transjordan, and Yemen similarly to how Europeans described Muslims and Ottomans or settlers in the United States viewed Native Americans.2 Abdülhamid II compared the Kurds and nomads in eastern Anatolia to the ‘savage tribes in America’.3
Reading these Ottoman Orientalists’ accounts, one discovers that there were many regions competing to be the Ottoman Wild West. The Ottoman Turkish elite serving the sultan in these provinces or travelling there for other reasons saw the people living there as ‘wild’, ‘violent’, ‘primitive’, ‘uncivilised savages’ in need of enlightenment so as to be brought into the modern world. As many of these groups were already Muslim, Islam was not the sole marker of civilisation. The people in the provinces were encouraged to abandon nomadism and settle in urban areas, trade ignorance for education in newly built schools, and relinquish sloth and poverty for industriousness. They were to exchange a diseased body for one improved by hygiene and modern medicine, measure their day by twenty-four-hour clock time assisted by the construction of prominent clock towers, and dress in Westernised late-Ottoman fashion. They were supposed to discontinue what were perceived as crude manners, lax morals, and odd customs.
Orientalism was one of the factors that helped unravel the empire of conversion. Moving away from Islam and conversion as the principal glue of society and towards a civilising mission as the thing that bound the elite together, these Ottoman Turkish elites saw themselves as shouldering the ‘Ottoman man’s burden’ in relation to the Albanians, Arabs, and Islamic sectarians of the empire, such as the Druze. Sometimes they viewed people in places like Arabia or Lebanon with such disdain that they referred to them as nonhuman, as ‘insects’.4
Ottoman administrators in Arab provinces such as Yemen and Ottoman Muslim travellers within the empire or in Africa expressed as much antipathy towards their subjects as British and French colonial administrators did. Wealthy Ottomans travelling into the outback of the empire frequently displayed Orientalist attitudes: they judged local peoples by what they considered civilised Ottoman culture, found them lacking, and dismissed them as ‘backward’, ‘savage’, and not ‘modern’.5 They viewed them as the other, displaying feelings of innate superiority even when the people in question were also Muslims or subjects of the same sultan. Just as Christian Europeans viewed people who were not Christians as the least civilised, Ottoman elites viewed Africans and people who were not Muslims as lower on the scale of civilisation.
Mehmed Emin, a servant of the sultan travelling to Central Asia in the mid-1870s, viewed Ottoman culture as superior and ‘the Turkish race’ as better than others. He imagined the reason for Ottoman success as being racial: ‘Because the Turks who were the origin of our Ottoman nationhood came under the leadership’ of the Oğuz tribe ‘from such a progressive, civilised and prosperous area’ they were able to establish ‘a world-conquering state which unified so many nations and showed the world the model of a new civilisation’.6
According to the man of letters Ahmed Midhat Efendi, writing in 1878, the Ottomans had much to learn from Western Europe, just as Muslim-majority societies had much to learn from the Ottomans. While Europe had progressed ‘with many inventions and modernised with new laws of civilisation’ and had ‘really amazed the human mind’, Muslim-majority societies need ‘our guidance in matters of progress and innovation’.7 The Ottomans, he argued, should embark on a civilising mission to the Arab world.
An Ottoman translator and diplomat from the 1870s noted that the Sudan was uncivilised and culturally backward. He looked down on the ‘half-naked’ inhabitants and disparaged ‘the ridiculous customs of the negroes in Central and South Africa who are still pagan’. Taking a page out of the racist views of white Southerners in the United States, he added, ‘They have an innate inclination towards play and dance which are the amusements the negro races love most’.8
Ottomans wrote as colonialists. The Treaty of Berlin of 1878, despite causing the Ottomans to lose one-third of their territory in Europe in the wake of the 1877–1878 war with Russia, gave the Ottomans the chance to participate in the scramble for Africa. The last Ottoman holdings in Africa were in Libya, which became a focus of Abdülhamid II in the final decades of his reign. At the 1884–1885 Berlin Conference, also known as the Congo Conference, which legitimated foreign colonialism in Africa, the Ottoman delegation referred to its holdings of Tripoli, Benghazi, and Ghat in Libya as colonies. Writing in 1908, an Ottoman administrator and parliamentarian criticised Ottoman neglect of North Africa and advocated a revitalised Ottoman commitment to Tripoli. His reason was explicitly imperial. Controlling Tripoli allowed ‘the fastest civilised connecting link’ between Europe and the markets of Central Africa.9 In his 1909 travelogue of the Sudan, a diplomat bemoaned the fact that the Ottomans had not acted in time to colonise that country, ceding it to another colonial power, the British.
The Ottoman elite had internalised Western European Orientalist views of themselves. They expressed their own Orientalism regarding the people they ruled. Ottoman Orientalism was ingrained in elite visions of how to reform the empire and make it modern. More significant is the fact that the degrading sentiment was pervasive. These elites wished to transform their own ‘Orient’: they centralised the empire, took control of administration of the provinces directly without local mediators (the notables upon whom they had formerly relied), and constructed railways, roads, primary, secondary, and military schools, barracks, mosques, and government buildings. They sought to convert those groups they perceived as not being modern—Arabs, Bedouin, nomads, Kurds, lower classes, and women—and who hindered the progress they wished to make into useful populations so as to save the empire. The Ottoman elite conceived of themselves from the mid-nineteenth century as a civilised and civilising force, as did other European Orientalists. The elite articulated not the white man’s burden, but what one Turkish scholar has labelled ‘the white man’s burden wearing a fez’.10 They saw themselves as being enlightened and therefore charged with uplifting stagnant peoples and groups, rejuvenating the empire’s east, and bringing about a renaissance.
In the view of another imperial translator, who referred to the areas south of Ottoman Libya in his work New Africa (1890), colonialism was a positive good in which ‘a civilised state sends settlers out to lands where people still live in a state of nomadism and savagery, developing these areas, and causing them to be a market for its goods’.11 Ottoman provincial governors’ views of the Bedouin were as paternalistic as those of British, French, and German colonial officials. The comments of their wives about Arabs were similar to European women travellers’ views of the same peoples in that era.
Artist Naciye Neyyal, who accompanied her husband, Tevfik Bey, to Jerusalem, where he was governor between 1897 and 1901, noted that their life there was like that of ‘a prince and princess ruling a faraway kingdom’.12 She also wrote in a patronising way of the Bedouin: ‘I sensed that they liked us because, although they are savage, and live so far from civilisation, they appreciate goodwill and know how to be thankful’.13 It was no accident that thirty-four of the final thirty-nine Ottoman grand viziers were Turks.14 The elite was becoming more Turkish and less tolerant of others, even when those others were fellow Muslims.
Western armchair and in-person visitors to the empire were more concerned with Ottoman women than any other topic. A central element in Orientalist representations of Ottoman otherness was the harem—the private quarters of a Muslim home, not something only the sultan had—which they depicted as a sexualised fantasy zone. European men and women portrayed themselves as ‘liberators’ of Ottoman women, whom they sought to unveil (and disrobe), while being titillated by the idea of secluded women and polygamy. The English painter John Frederick Lewis resided in Cairo for a decade in the middle of the nineteenth century, ‘going native’ by living among Arabs in a palatial home in an old quarter and dressing like them in robes and turban. He entertained visitors with coffee and hookah pipes like an Ottoman gentleman and was considered the main British authority on the harem, despite never having entered one.15 He relied upon women travellers’ accounts for his knowledge. He used his English wife, Marian, as his model, including as the sleeping ‘Cairene’ woman depicted in his Siesta (1876), part of Tate Britain’s permanent exhibition, Walk Through British Art.16 Likewise, he labelled his own self-portrait as Portrait of a Memlook (Mamluk) Bey.
These fanciful conceits notwithstanding, his voyeuristic painting The Harem (1849) gained him fame in Britain.17 It depicts a turbaned Mamluk bey with bejewelled dagger lounging on a luxurious sofa with a young woman, with two other women at his feet—his three Georgian, Greek, or Circassian concubines or wives—in his harem in Cairo. None of these women are veiled. Next to them stands a smiling African servant woman. They are watching a very dark-skinned, tall, grinning African eunuch display an embarrassed, seminude East African slave woman clutching what remains of her garment. Another African slave holds a water pipe. A gazelle sits on the divan. Another wanders across the room. Despite its preposterousness, this image was taken as a realistic ethnographic study. The painting was hailed by art critics as ‘one of the most remarkable productions of this age of English art’ and ‘the most extraordinary production that has ever been executed in water-colour’.18
Upper-class European women gained actual access to harems, beginning in the eighteenth century with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who recorded her knowledge in the well-known Turkish Embassy Letters. Having witnessed firsthand the lifesaving effects of variolation (an early form of immunisation against smallpox) in Istanbul, she promoted it to England. More and more British women visited the empire in the nineteenth century. Despite their relationships with harem women and their knowledge of the harem as a family quarter rather than as a sexual playground, they tended to repeat Orientalist stereotypes of harems as exotic places of fantasy—lesbian or feminine rather than masculine—and sites of mystery and intrigue, comparing them to The Thousand and One Nights and seeing them as dens of timeless luxury, sensuality, and beauty.19
Ottoman women from the harem sometimes sought to subvert such narratives. One response is found in Ottoman art and literature. Elite Ottoman women commissioned portraits, carefully choosing how they would be depicted so as to have some manner of control over how the West viewed them. Reformer sultan Abdülmecid I’s daughter Fatma, at that time in her late teens, invited British traveller Mary Adelaide Walker to enter her harem to paint her portrait around the same time as Lewis was painting The Harem.20 Walker resided in Istanbul for thirty years. She painted Sultan Abdülaziz I’s portrait for the Ottoman exhibition at the 1867 Universal Exposition in Paris, which he visited. Abdülaziz I spent six weeks in France, and visited Austria, Belgium, England, Germany, and Hungary, the first and only sultan to travel outside the imperial domains not at the head of an army, and the first sultan to visit Western Europe.21 In London he commissioned Englishman Charles Fuller to cast a bronze equestrian statue of him, which he displayed in his new Beylerbeyi Palace on the Asian side of Istanbul.22
Over the course of six months, as Walker painted her, Fatma chose her dress, a combination of Western European and Ottoman fashion, and her pose.23 The portrait is staid and formal. It depicts the princess wearing a white French-silk outfit, a European-style bodice beneath a loose robe with Ottoman baggy trousers, as well as a diamond-covered girdle and a small portrait of her father.24 Fatma prohibited the portrait from being circulated outside the palace, so that her figure would not be gazed upon by strangers. Her father Abdülmecid I’s 1857 portrait by Armenian painter Ruben Manas was sent to the queen of Sweden, Sophia of Nassau, as a gift and is still exhibited today at Drottningholm Palace in Stockholm. It depicts a nineteenth-century European ruler in a headdress meant to distinguish him both from other rulers and from his turbaned predecessors, including Selim III: a red fez. His daughter’s portrait is known only from Walker’s notebooks.25 Unlike the male fantasy works such as those by Lewis, works such as Walker’s are still relatively unknown in the canon of Orientalist art.
The imagined divide between the Western self and the Eastern other assumed political significance as support of Greek culture and Greek independence spread in Western Europe. In this context, Orientalist painters depicted Turks and Muslims in stereotypes. One was as bloodthirsty tyrants and religious fanatics. A well-known example is Eugène Delacroix’s The Massacre at Chios (1824), based on the 1822 Ottoman massacre and enslavement of many thousands of Greek civilians during the Greek rebellion. The Massacre at Chios is painted in gory and shocking detail, with suggestions of rape—nude and emaciated Christ-like men, elderly women, and children. One babe tries to suckle at the breast of its nude, dead mother. Another stereotype is Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps’s The Turkish Patrol (1830). In it, fierce and fearsome armed men race through a deserted street, veiled women looking on from the shadows.
Another main theme in Orientalist painting is that Muslims are lustful and paedophiles. Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Snake Charmer (1880) shows a nude young boy with his back to the viewer. Facing his audience of leering men, the boy holds an erect snake aloft. One man wears a classical Janissary helmet. They sit with their backs to a brilliant blue-tiled building reminiscent of the circumcision chamber in Topkapı Palace.26 The same painter’s Arab Girl in a Doorway (1873) presents the viewer a veiled young girl, perhaps a prostitute, beckoning from an alleyway with breasts exposed. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s The Turkish Bath (1862–1863) fills the tableau with an impossible scenario of countless, fully nude, blonde or red-haired women lounging in the harem bath, two in intimate embrace, an erotic fantasy that was everything the actual harem was not.
The first Western-trained Ottoman artist, Osman Hamdi Bey, the founder of Istanbul’s Academy of Fine Arts (1882) and Archaeology Museum (1891) was schooled in these offensive depictions. Osman Hamdi’s obituary referred to him as ‘the most Parisian of the Ottomans—the most Ottoman of the Parisians’. He lived many years in France, was married to French women, and painted Orientalist works that were lent ‘authenticity’ because the artist was an Ottoman.27 His work illustrates how the Ottoman elite incorporated Orientalist discourse about the Ottomans and deployed it against their own people.
Osman Hamdi’s Greek father was a survivor of the Ottoman massacre at Chios during the Greek rebellion that led to independence. He was subsequently purchased as a slave by the Ottoman admiral of the navy, who sent him to be educated in France. Like his father, Osman Hamdi also studied in Paris. His painting master was none other than the Orientalist Gérôme—painter of The Snake Charmer—with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship. Osman Hamdi was an Ottoman Orientalist who used the same components of Orientalist paintings—women, Islam, Topkapı Palace tiles, prayer rugs, incense holders, and sixteenth-century Janissary helmets—and sometimes gave them shocking new meaning.
Osman Hamdi’s paintings, which were exhibited in Western Europe and North America rather than in Istanbul, most often depict a thick-bearded ‘Oriental’ male, using himself as model; wearing typical ‘Oriental’ dress in a representative location, such as a mosque; surrounded by ‘Oriental’ artifacts.28 These works reflect the Orientalist aim to civilise the exotic Arabs and nomads he encountered when he spent two years as an administrator in Ottoman Iraq.29 His views and depictions of Muslims and Arabs are hard to distinguish from those of Western European Orientalists. Yet one of his most shocking paintings went much further than other Orientalist artists for its blasphemous depiction. With his daughter as the likely model, Genesis (1901), exhibited in Berlin and London, depicts a young, pregnant woman wearing a bold, sunflower-coloured décolleté dress sitting in a mosque. What is astonishing about her is that she is perched on a Qur’an stand with her back to the mihrab (prayer niche) and trampling on open Qur’an manuscripts, perhaps signifying female emancipation from Islam.30 The work was never displayed in the Ottoman Empire.
Genesis celebrates women’s reproductive power. As illustrated by this painting, Osman Hamdi’s art is testimony to another cultural change. As Europe, including the Ottoman Empire, transformed over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and began to find the man-boy love of pederasty to be inappropriate, so, too, did the Ottoman elite begin to disapprove of such practices and become ashamed of them. This led to denial and silencing of such ‘embarrassment’.31 Once normal, same-sex relations became frowned upon and deemed offensive, such that today they are barely remembered or remarked upon, despite their obvious presence in the Ottoman literature of the premodern era. Already in the Period of Reforms of the mid-nineteenth century, Ottoman reformists aimed to crack down on such practices.
For centuries it was deemed acceptable for older men to desire young men. But in the nineteenth century, Western Europeans began to look at Ottoman sex and sexuality as depraved, deformed, libidinous, and licentious. Reflecting on their sexual practices, Ottomans also began to feel a sense of disgrace. They presented their morality as based on rigidly defined gender roles, the seclusion of women, and a heterosexual ethic. In the oft-cited, self-serving, perhaps disingenuous words of nineteenth-century historian and conservative reformist statesman Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, in the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman men ceased loving boys: ‘With the increase of women lovers the number of boy-beloveds decreased and the sodomites seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth. Ever since then the well-known love for and relationships with the young men of Istanbul was transferred to young women as the natural order of things’, a transformation caused in part by the ‘disapproval of [Western European] foreigners’.32
Thus began the journey to suppress established sexual discourses, silence them, and replace them with other sanitised genres. And this is the legacy we have today. Ubiquitous sixteenth-century works such as those by Crazy Brother (Deli Birader) Gazali, which promote sex with boys as superior to sex with women, are not seen as part of the Ottoman literary canon. Modern Turks have used such texts to disparage both Ottoman court literature and the Ottoman dynasty and elite as ‘perverse’, seemingly unaware that they are mimicking the arguments of nineteenth-century Western Europeans who portrayed the Ottomans as decadent.33 They have criticised Ottoman court poetry as ‘perverted’ and thus unworthy of study in Turkey. They take expressions of desire to be merely metaphorical, rather than reflecting any actual sexual relations.
Modern Westerners have also generally avoided including homoeroticism in their description and analysis of their own culture and history, as well as that of the Ottoman Empire and Middle East. This is due in part to a desire not to offend their Middle Eastern or Turkish colleagues and audiences, or perhaps because they accept the argument that such homoerotic love poetry was merely spiritual, or that it was an imitation of earlier Persian poetry. It supposedly had nothing to do with anything worldly, with actual love. We forget that once men did not glorify married love with women but love with boys. It was deemed normal. The fact that rape was a criminal offence and that the only legally sanctioned sexual intercourse was between a man and his wife and between a master (male) and his slave (female) did not hinder the flourishing of an elite Ottoman male culture of pederasty. Such elite male pederasty had also flourished in the rest of contemporary Europe. As sixteenth-century Ottoman thinker Mustafa Ali wrote of his own inclinations, until the age of thirty he alternated between desiring pretty girls and beautiful boys.34
By the era of Abdülhamid II, however, the Ottoman elite had become consumed by their exotic image in the rest of Europe, hypersensitive to what they perceived as slights and slurs. They did all they could to reject their own society’s ‘backwardness’ and change it to a ‘civilised’ one based on Western European values.35 To accomplish this aim, some radicals based in Salonica demanded the overthrow of the old regime and all the values for which it stood. One of them was named Enver Bey, the red-fez-capped, handlebar-moustachioed, modern-military-uniform-wearing subject of Osman Hamdi Bey’s last major portrait.36 Enver Bey and like-minded militants were called the Young Turks. They were influenced by the Young Ottomans but turned away from the Islamic content of their predecessors’ aims. Islam had served for centuries to make Ottoman Muslims religious equals, as conversion had been a pathway to such equality. When the Ottoman elite internalised Western views of Muslims and adapted them as an Ottoman Orientalism, they undermined the role of Islam in uniting its citizens and weakened the bonds that formed the framework for the empire of conversion. Promoting revolution, war, and genocide, the Young Turk power grab in 1913 would lead to dictatorship and the end of the dynasty in the following decade.