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A COMMENT ON MEHMET BENGÜ ULUENGIN, “SECULARIZING ANATOLIA TICK BY TICK: CLOCK TOWERS IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE TURKISH REPUBLIC” (IJMES 42 [2010]: 17–36)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 July 2010

Avner Wishnitzer
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Extract

In his recent article, “Secularizing Anatolia Tick by Tick: Clock Towers in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic,” Mehmet Bengü Uluengin makes a significant contribution to our understanding of late Ottoman and early republican clock towers. Uluengin shows that Ottoman clock towers carried “complex and seemingly contradictory layering of meanings” (p. 31). These buildings were at times associated with Christianity and with European power but were also seen as modern extensions of the Islamic institution of the muvakkit (timekeeper) or as symbols of the Ottoman government and its modernizing project. The cultural meanings associated with clock towers were fluid, concludes Uluengin, and it was the context that determined the way clock towers were interpreted.

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Notes and Comments
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International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 3 , August 2010 , pp. 537 - 540
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

NOTES

1 Only in the last page of the article does Uluengin clearly acknowledge that clock towers were “transformed” at some point to “agents of secularization à la Ataürk” (p. 32) or in other words, that they had not served that function earlier. However, according to Uluengin, Atatürk's republic consciously distanced itself from the Ottoman clock towers rather than transformed their meanings. If neither the Ottomans nor the early republicans saw the Ottoman clock towers as agents of secularization, why are they still presented that way?

2 Avner Wishnitzer, “The Transformation of Ottoman Temporal Culture during the ‘Long Nineteenth Century’” (PhD diss., Tel Aviv University, 2009), 154–57, 215–23, 324–48.

3 Tanyeli, Uğur, “The Emergence of Modern Time Consciousness in the Islamic World and the Problematics of Spatial Perception,” in Anytime, ed. Davidson, Cynthia C. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 162Google Scholar. That the government use of the alaturka system referred to standard clock hours measured from sunset is evident also in the very exact hours specified in countless official documents. Such exactitude would have been impossible with the seasonal hours used in previous centuries. For more on the Ottoman hour system, see Wishnitzer, “The Transformation,” 43–51. It seems that outside governmental systems many people still used mechanical clocks to roughly indicate seasonal hours.

4 For the coordination of ferries' schedules with working hours, see, for example, BOA, Y.MTV 188/71, 15 Mart 1315 (27.3.1899). For the use of the alaturka system in the administrative and education systems, see Wishnitzer, “The Transformation,” 99–115, 125–54, 235–65. For contemporary discussions of the problems presented by the alaturka system, see, for example, Hamid, Hassan, “Şemsi Tarih, Zevali Saat,” Mülkiye 2, 1 Mart 1325 (14 March 1909): 25–29Google Scholar; and Samım, Ahmet, “Vaktimizi Bilelim,” Sada-ı Millet 111 (21 March 1910): 1–5Google Scholar.

5 BOA, Y.PRK.PT 8/11, 1.C.1310 (21 October 1892). See also BOA, I.DH 940/74403, 3.Ra.1302 (21 December 1884); BOA, DH.MKT 1405/50, 22.C.1304 (17 March 1887); BOA, DH.MKT 1408/109, 6.R.1304 (31 March 1887).

6 BOA, Y.MTV 49/84, 1.N.1308 (10 April 1891). Touraj Atabaki has already suggested that religious opposition to public clocks focused on the bells and not on the clocks or the towers. See Atabaki, Touraj, “Time, Labour-Discipline and Modernization in Turkey and Iran: Some Comparative Remarks,” in The State and the Subalterns: Modernization, Society and the State in Turkey and Iran, ed. Atabaki, Touraj (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 3–4, 15Google Scholar.

7 The inscriptions often resembled inscriptions on muvakkit houses. See Nil Birol, “Managing the Time of the Bureaucrat in the Late Nineteenth Century Ottoman Administration” (M.A. thesis, Boğaziçi University, 2005), 50, 53–54. See also Kreiser, Klaus, “Ottoman Clock Towers: A Preliminary Survey and Some General Remarks on Construction Dates, Sponsors, Locations and Functions,” in Essays in Honour of Ekmeledin İhsanoğlu, vol. 1, ed. Kaçar, Mustafa and Durukal, Zeynep (Istanbul: IRCICA, 2006), 545–47Google Scholar.

8 For a very explicit example of the use of a clock tower in such competitions, see Yetkin, Sabrı, Kentsel bir Sembolün Doğuşu—İzmir Saat Kulesi (İzmir, Turkey: İzmir Büyükşehir Belediyesi, 2001)Google Scholar. For the role played by high officials in the construction of clock towers, see Kreiser, “Ottoman Clock Towers,” 543–56.

9 At least two governors took the trouble of preparing a small, decorated model of the tower they had constructed and sent it to Yıldız. See BOA, Y.PRK.UM 53/67, 2.Z.1318 (22.3.1901); and BOA, Y.PRK.UM 80/69, 21.N.1325 (27.10.1907).

10 See, for example, “Ha-Shavuʿa,” Hashkafa 93 (30 August 1907), 2 (in Hebrew). For the enthusiastic coverage of the construction of the clock tower in Izmir, see Yetkin, Kentsel, 8–10.

11 Fuchs, Ron and Gilbert, Herbert, “A Colonial Portrait of Jerusalem: British Architecture in Mandate Era Palestine,” in Hybrid Urbanism: On the Identity Discourse and the Built Environment, ed. Alsayyad, Nezar (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001), 89–91Google Scholar.