The state and the subaltern
Touraj Atabaki
I.B. Tauris Publishers
Compared to other trends in historiography, the social history of the Middle East is a terrain that still lacks many explorers. As was the case with European historiography, up to the twentieth century the historiography of the Middle East was dominated by political, dynastical and genealogical historiography as well as narratives of the life and times of individual elites. Nevertheless, by ‘the remarkable and worldwide growth of sociology as an academic subject and fashion’ 1 especially during the last 50 years, the social history of Middle Eastern societies was gradually acknowledged as a legitimate academic field by many historians. Albert Hourani’s work on the history of the Arab peoples,2 Halil Inalcik’s volume on the social history of the Ottoman Empire3 and Abdulhussein Zarinkoub’s accounts of the Iranians’ early reaction to the Arab invasion of the seventh century4 are among the most renowned examples of Middle Eastern social historiography. It was indeed ...
Contents
List of Contributors / vii
Acknowledgements / xi
Note on Transliteration / xii
Introduction - Touraj Atabaki / xiii
1. Time, Labour-Discipline and Modernization in Turkey and Iran: Some Comparative Remarks - Touraj Atabaki / 1
2. Workers and the State during the Late Ottoman Empire - Donald Quataert / 17
3. Disgruntled Guests: Iranian Subalterns on the Margins of the Tsarist Empire - Touraj Atabaki / 31
4. The Modernization of the Empire and the Community ‘Privileges’: Greek Orthodox Responses to the Young Turk Policies - Vangelis Kechriotis / 53
5. Reform from Above, Resistance from Below: The New Order and its Opponents in Iran, 1927–29 - Stephanie Cronin / 71
6. The Ottoman Legacy of the Kemalist Republic - Erik-Jan Zürcher / 95
7. With or Without Workers in Reza Shah’s Iran: Abadan, May 1929 - Kaveh Bayat / 111
8. Sufi Reactions Against the Reforms After Turkey’s National Struggle: How a Nightingale Turned into a Crow - Hülya Küçük / 123
9. A Reaction to Authoritarian Modernization in Turkey: The Menemen Incident and the Creation and Contestation of a Myth, 1930–31 - Umut Azak / 143
10. Authority and Agency: Revisiting Women’s Activism during Reza Shah’s Period - Afsaneh Najmabadi / 159
11. Polygamy Before and After the Introduction of the Swiss Civil Code in Turkey - Nicole A.N.M. van Os / 179
Notes / 199
Index / 249
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The idea for this volume arose out of a workshop I organized at the International Institute of Social History in 2003. The workshop was held in honour of Erik-Jan Zürcher, who during his ten years as head of the Department of Turkish at the International Institute of Social History contributed significantly to collecting archival materials as well as conducting research on modern Turkey.
In organizing this workshop I greatly enjoyed the support of Jaap Kloosterman, the director of the International Institute of Social History, and Marcel van der Linden, the head of the Research Department.
In the process of editing this volume, I benefited from the indispensable assistance of David and Alison Worthington, Hans Timmermans, Mieke Stroo and Zeynep Altok, who were kind enough to spend considerable time reading the manuscript and sharing their editorial comments with me.
I would like to offer my sincere thanks to all of them.
Note on Transliteration
Transliteration is always a thorny problem when one is dealing with several languages and alphabets at once. The system adopted in this work for Persian and Ottoman Turkish is a modified version of the system used by the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES). For the sake of convenience diacritical marks have been omitted, with the exception of ‘ayn (‘) and hamzah (’) for the Persian and in representing the vowels for Ottoman Turkish. In the case of Azerbaijani words, a modified Persian system has been followed, except again in representing the vowels.
Current English spelling of names such as Azerbaijan, Kerman, Istanbul, Isfahan, Sheikh, Reza, Hafez and Hussein have been retained. With the exception of Dr Cronin’s article, in which she opted for a different transliteration system, every effort has been made to observe the utmost consistency in style and transliteration in this volume.
Introduction
Touraj Atabaki
Compared to other trends in historiography, the social history of the Middle East is a terrain that still lacks many explorers. As was the case with European historiography, up to the twentieth century the historiography of the Middle East was dominated by political, dynastical and genealogical historiography as well as narratives of the life and times of individual elites. Nevertheless, by ‘the remarkable and worldwide growth of sociology as an academic subject and fashion’ 1 especially during the last 50 years, the social history of Middle Eastern societies was gradually acknowledged as a legitimate academic field by many historians. Albert Hourani’s work on the history of the Arab peoples,2 Halil Inalcik’s volume on the social history of the Ottoman Empire3 and Abdulhussein Zarinkoub’s accounts of the Iranians’ early reaction to the Arab invasion of the seventh century4 are among the most renowned examples of Middle Eastern social historiography. It was indeed with the recognition of social history that the grassroots history, or, as Eric Hobsbawm referred to it, history from below or the ‘history of common people’,5 found its way into the Middle Eastern historiography. Although history from below is a new trend in Middle Eastern historiography, one can mention some studies in this area: Ervand Abrahamian’s study of the crowd in Iranian politics,6 which follows George Rudé’s distinguished study of the crowds’ role in the French Revolution, and Huri Islamoğlu-Inan’s account of state and peasant relations in Ottoman Turkey.7
In studying the practice of modernization in the Middle East in general and in Turkey and Iran in particular one also faces very serious deficiencies in historical accounts and analysis on accommodation and resistance to the changes that the Turkish and Iranian societies have been confronted with during the last 200 years. Although the study of modernization in Turkey and Iran has been the subject of numerous academic studies, these studies examine the practice of modernization exclusively from above, i.e. the measures adopted by political regimes in changing societies, introducing new rules and regulations, and founding new social and political institutions. However, ...
Contributors
Touraj Atabaki is Professor of History of the Middle East and Central Asia at Leiden University and Senior Research Fellow at the International Institute of Social History. He is the author of Azerbaijan: Ethnicity and the Struggle for Powers in Iran (London: I.B. Tauris, 1993), of Beyond Essentialism: Who Writes Whose Past in the Middle East and Central Asia? (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2003), editor of Post-Soviet Central Asia (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998), of Men of Order: Authoritarian Modernisation in Turkey and Iran (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), of Central Asia and the Caucasus: Transnationalism and Diaspora (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), and Iran and the First World War: Battleground of the Great Powers (London: I.B.Tauris, 2006). His current work focuses on the historiography of everyday life and comparative subaltern history.
Umut Azak is an instructor in Islam and Politics in Turkey at Utrecht University. She is currently concluding her PhD thesis on Continuity and Change in the Discourse of Secularism in Turkey (1946–1966) at the University of Leiden.
Kaveh Bayat is an independent researcher working in Iran. He has published extensively in Persian on modern history, especially military history, and tribal and ethnic politics.
Stephanie Cronin is Iran Heritage Foundation Fellow in Iranian History, University of Northampton. She is the author of The Army and the Creation of the Pahlavi State in Iran, 1910–1926 (London: I.B.Tauris, 1997), and editor of The Making of Modern Iran: State and Society under Riza Shah, 1921–1941 (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003) and Reformers and Revolutionaries in Modern Iran: New Perspectives on the Iranian Left (London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2004). Her recent publications include Tribal Politics in Iran: Rural Conflict and the New State 1921–1941 (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), and an edited collection, Subalterns, Social Protest: History from Below in the Middle East and North Africa (forthcoming).
Vangelis Kechriotis is Assistant Professor at the History Department, Boğaziçi University, where he teaches Balkan history and the history of non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire. He holds a PhD from the University of Leiden, the title of his thesis being The Greeks of Izmir: An Ottoman Non-Muslim Community between Autonomy and Patriotism. He is a member of a research group on historiography and the theory of history, which since 1999 has published the review Historein. He is also fellow of a project for the publication of a four-volume Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1770–1945): Texts and Commentaries by CEU Press, Budapest. He has also published articles on Izmir and the Greek Orthodox of the Ottoman Empire.
Hülya Küçük is Associate Professor of the History of Sufism at Selçuk University, Konya. She is the author of Tasavvuf Tarihine Giriş (Konya: Nükte, 2004, 2nd ed), The Roles of the Bektashis in Turkey’s National Struggle (Leiden: Brill, 2002), Kurtuluş Savaşında Bektaşiler (Istanbul, Kitap, 2003), and Sultan Veled Ve Maarif ’ i. Kitâbu’ l-Hikemiyye adlı Maârif Tercüme ve Şerhi (Konya: Konya Büyükşehir Belediyesi, 2005). Her current study focuses on the history of Sufism in classical times and today.
Afsaneh Najmabadi is Professor of History and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Her most recent book is Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), a study of cultural transformations in nineteenth-century Iran centred on reconfigurations of gender and sexuality. She is currently working on several projects, ‘Sexing Gender, Transing Homos: Travail of Sexuality in Contemporary Iran’, ‘How an Aqa became an Agha: Women’s Sociality and Sexuality in Qajar Iran’, and ‘Genealogies of Iranian Feminism’. She is an associate editor of a six-volume project, Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, with volume 1 published in 2003 and volume 2 in 2005 (Leiden: Brill). Previous publications in English include The Story of Daughters of Quchan: Gender and National Memory in Iranian History (Syracuse and New York: Syracuse University Press, 1998), and Women Autobiographies in Contemporary Iran (editor and contributor) (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1991).
Nicole A.N.M. van Os studied Middle East Studies at Nijmegen University, the Netherlands. After receiving her MA degree she moved to Turkey, where she taught at Koç University, Istanbul. During her ten-year stay in Turkey, she published several articles on women in the Ottoman Empire. She is the author of ‘Müstehlik değil müstahsil (Producers, not Consumers): Ottoman Muslim Women and Millï İktisat’, in Kemal Çiçek et al (eds), The Great Ottoman–Turkish Civilization, vol. 2 (Ankara: Yeni Türkiye, 2000), ‘Ottoman Women’s Organizations: Sources of the Past, Sources for the Future’, Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, XI, 3 (Winter 2000), and ‘The Ottoman State as Bread Giver: The Muinsiz Aile Maaşı’, in Erik-Jan Zürcher (ed), Arming the State (London: I.B.Tauris, 1999). She is especially interested in the interrelatedness of nationalist and feminist movements in the first decade of the twentieth century.
Donald Quataert is Professor of History at Binghamton University and a recent Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is the author of The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Ottoman Manufacturing in the Age of the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Workers, Peasants and Economic Change in the Ottoman Empire, 1730–1914 (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1993), Manufacturing and Technology Transfer in the Ottoman Empire, 1800–1914 (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1992), and Social Disintegration and Popular Resistance in the Ottoman Empire, 1881–1908: Reactions to European Economic Penetration (New York: New York University Press, 1983).
Erik-Jan Zürcher holds the chair of Turkish Studies at the University of Leiden. He has published The Unionist Factor (Leiden: Brill, 1984), Political Opposition in the Early Turkish Republic (Leiden: Brill, 1991) and Turkey. A Modern History (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 1993) and has co-edited Socialism and Nationalism in the Ottoman Empire (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 1994), Workers and Working Class in the Ottoman Empire (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 1995), Arming the State: Military Conscription in the Middle East and Central Asia (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 1999), Identity Politics in Central Asia and the Muslim World (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2001), and Men of Order, Authoritarian Modernization in Turkey and Iran (London: I.B.Tauris, 2004). His main research interest is the political and social history of the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic.
Touraj Atabaki
The state and the subaltern
I.B. Tauris Publishers
I.B. Tauris Publishers
The state and the subaltern
Modernization, Society and the State in Turkey and Iran
Touraj Atabaki
I.B. Tauris Publishers
London - New York
in association with
The International Institute of
Social History, Amsterdam
Published in 2007 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
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Copyright © 2007 Touraj Atabaki
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Library of Modern Middle East Studies 66
ISBN: 978 1 84511 339 1
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