Untold Histories of the Middle East: Recovering Voices from the 19th and 20th Centuries (SOAS Routledge Studies on the Middle East)

272 Pages·2010·1.96 MB·English

by  Amy Singer

Untold Histories of the Middle East
Much traditional historiography consciously and unconsciously glosses over certain
discourses, narratives, and practices. This book examines silences or omissions in
Middle Eastern history at the turn of the twenty-first century, to give a fuller account
of the society, culture and politics of the period.
With a particular focus on the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, Egypt, Iran and Palestine,
established scholars from within the region consider how and why such silences occur,
as well as the timing and motivation for breaking them. Introducing unexpected,
sometimes counter-intuitive, issues in history, the chapters examine:
(cid:127)
women and children survivors of the Armenian massacres in 1915
(cid:127)
Greek-Orthodox subjects who supported the Ottoman Empire and the formation
of the Turkish republic
(cid:127) the conflicts among Palestinians during the revolt of 1936–39
(cid:127)
pre-marital sex in modern Egypt
(cid:127)
Arab authors writing about the Balkans
(cid:127)
the economic, not national or racial, origins of anti-Armenian violence
(cid:127)
the European women who married Muslim Egyptians
Drawing on a wide range of sources and methodologies such as interviews, newly
discovered archives, fictional accounts and memoirs, each chapter analyses a story and
its suppression, considering how their absences have affected our previous under-
standings of the history of the Middle East.

Amy Singer is Professor of Ottoman history at Tel Aviv University. Her research
focuses on the Ottoman public kitchens (imaret), and on the city of Edirne; she won
the 2008 Sakıp Sabancı International Research Award in Turkish Studies for ‘The
Persistence of Philanthropy’.
Christoph K. Neumann is Chair of Turkish Studies at Ludwig Maximilian University
Munich. He has published widely on Ottoman history. After his PhD (Munich
University, 1992) he researched and taught at the Orient-Institute in Istanbul, in
Prague and again at different universities in Istanbul.
Selçuk Aks¸in Somel is Assistant Professor of Ottoman History at Sabancı University,
Turkey. He specializes in Ottoman education, gender history, legitimacy and power,
and the modernization of central bureaucracy.
SOAS/Routledge Studies on the Middle East
Series Editors
Benjamin C. Fortna, SOAS, University of London
Ulrike Freitag, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
This series features the latest disciplinary approaches to Middle Eastern
Studies. It covers the Social Sciences and the Humanities in both the pre-
modern and modern periods of the region. While primarily interested in
publishing single-authored studies, the series is also open to edited volumes
on innovative topics, as well as textbooks and reference works.
1. Islamic Nationhood and 7. Cities in the Pre-Modern
Colonial Indonesia Islamic World
The Umma below the winds The urban impact of religion,
Michael Francis Laffan state, and society
Amira K. Bennison and
2. Russian-Muslim Confrontation in
Alison L. Gascoigne
the Caucasus
Alternative visions of the 8. Subalterns and Social Protest
conflict between Imam Shamil History from below in the
and the Russians, 1830–1859 Middle East and North Africa
Thomas Sanders, Ernest Tucker, Edited by Stephanie Cronin
G.M. Hamburg
9. Nazism in Syria and Lebanon
3. Late Ottoman Society The ambivalence of the German
The intellectual legacy option, 1933–1945
Edited by Elisabeth Özdalga Götz Nordbruch
4. Iraqi Arab Nationalism 10. Nationalism and Liberal Thought
Authoritarian, totalitarian in the Arab East
and pro-fascist inclinations, Ideology and practice
1932–1941 Edited by Christoph Schumann

Peter Wien
11. State-Society Relations in
5. Medieval Arabic Historiography Ba(cid:1)thist Iraq
Authors as actors Facing dictatorship
Konrad Hirschler Achim Rohde
6. The Ottoman Administration of 12. Untold Histories of the
Iraq, 1890–1908 Middle East
Gökhan Çetinsaya Recovering voices from the
19th and 20th centuries
Edited by Amy Singer,
Christoph K. Neumann and
Selçuk Aks¸in Somel
Untold Histories of the
Middle East
Recovering voices from the 19th and
20th centuries
Edited by
Amy Singer, Christoph K. Neumann
and Selçuk Aks¸in Somel
First published 2011
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010.
To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.
© 2011 editorial selection and matter, Amy Singer, Christoph K.
Neumann and Selçuk Aks¸in Somel; individual chapters the
contributors
The right of Amy Singer, Christoph K. Neumann and Selçuk Aks¸in
Somel to be identified as editors of this work has been asserted by them
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Untold histories of the Middle East : recovering voices from the 19th
and 20th centuries / edited by Amy Singer, Christoph K. Neumann and
Selçuk Aks¸in Somel.

p. cm.—(SOAS/Routledge studies on the Middle East ; no. 12)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Middle East—History—20th century. 2. Middle East—
History—19th century. 3. Turkey—History—20th century.
4. Turkey—History—19th century. 5. Middle East—
Historiography. 6. Turkey—Historiography. I. Singer, Amy.
II. Neumann, Christoph K., 1962–. III. Somel, Selçuk Ak¸sin.
DS49.U58 2011
956.04—dc22 2010007294
ISBN 0-203-84536-6 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 978-0-415-57010-7 (hbk)
ISBN 978-0-203-84536-3 (ebk)
‘There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part
of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.’
Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. I (1990), p. 27

Contents
Contributors ix
Introduction: re-sounding silent voices 1
·
SELÇUK AK¸SIN SOMEL, CHRISTOPH K. NEUMANN
AND AMY SINGER
Part I
Missing women 23
1 Unravelling layers of gendered silencing:
Converted Armenian survivors of the 1915 catastrophe 25
AYS¸E GÜL ALTINAY AND YEKTAN TÜRKYILMAZ
2 Interfaith unions and non-Muslim wives in
early twentieth-century Alexandrian Islamic courts 54
HANAN KHOLOUSSY
3 The silence of the pregnant bride: Non-marital sex
in Middle Eastern societies 71
LIAT KOZMA
Part II
Marginal lives 89
4 Silent voices within the elites: The social biography
of a modern shaykh 91
YOAV ALON
viii Contents
5 A nationalist discourse of heroism and treason:
The construction of an ‘official’ image of Çerkes Ethem
(1886–1948) in Turkish historiography, and recent challenges 106
BÜLENT BILMEZ
6 On the margins of national historiography:
·
The Greek Ittihatçı Emmanouil Emmanouilidis – opportunist
or Ottoman patriot? 124
VANGELIS KECHRIOTIS
7 The Ottoman Empire’s absent nineteenth century:
Autonomous subjects 143
CHRISTINE PHILLIOU
8 Looking behind Hajji Baba of Ispahan: The case
of Mirza Abul Hasan Khan Ilchi Shirazi 159
NAGHMEH SOHRABI
Part III
Memories of conflicts 177
9 Between the Balkan Wars (1912–13) and the
‘Third Balkan War’ of the 1990s: The memory of the
Balkans in Arabic writings 179
EYAL GINIO
10 The courts of the Palestinian Arab revolt, 1936–39 197
MUSTAFA KABHA
11 Multiplicity or polarity: A discursive analysis of

post-1908 violence in an Ottoman region 214
MELTEM TOKSÖZ
Glossary 229
Bibliography 234
Index 251
Notes on contributors
Yoav Alon (D.Phil. Oxon.) teaches modern history of the Middle East at Tel
Aviv University. He is the author of The Making of Jordan: Tribes, Coloni-
alism and the Modern State (2007). In recent years he has been engaged in
the study of tribal patterns of leadership in the Arab Middle East during
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition, he is researching the
relations between Jews, Arabs and the British in the Palestine Mandate
Police Force. Alon’s latest article, ‘“Heart-Beguiling Araby” on the
Frontier of Empire: Early Anglo-Arab Relations in Transjordan’ appeared
in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (2009).
Ays¸e Gül Altınay (PhD, Duke University) teaches at Sabancı University in
Istanbul. Her research and writing have focused on militarism, national-
ism, violence, gender, and sexuality. She is the author of The Myth of the
Military-Nation: Militarism, Gender and Education (2004) and co-author
of several works, including: is¸te böyle güzelim ... (based on women’s nar-
ratives of sexualities, with Hülya Adak, Esin Düzel and Nilgün Bayraktar
2008); and Torunlar (based on Muslim grandchildren’s narratives of their
converted Armenian grandparents, with Fethiye Çetin 2009). She is also
the editor of Vatan, Millet, Kadınlar (2000/2004) and Ebru: Reflections on
Cultural Diversity in Turkey, a photography project by Attila Durak
(2007). Her co-auth ored book with Yes¸im Arat, Türkiye’de Kadına Yönelik
S¸iddet was awarded the 2008 PEN Duygu Asena Award, and appeared in
English as: Violence Against Women in Turkey: A Nationwide Survey
(2009), www.kadinayoneliksiddet.org/English.html.
Bülent Bilmez (PhD, Humboldt University) teaches in the History Depart-
ment of Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey. His research interests include the
socio-economic, intellectual and political modernization processes in the
late Ottoman Empire and successor states in the Balkans, in particular
the history of the construction of national identities and nation-states
among the Muslim communities. His recent publications are: ‘A Con-
tested Nation-Builder: ¸Semseddin Sami Frashëri (1850–1904) and the
Construction of Albanian and Turkish Nations’, in We, the People: Politics
of National Peculiarity in Southeastern Europe, Diana Mishkova, ed.