This chapter traces the inflection of various religio-cultural traditions and customs of erotic love and sex and ordering of sexual acts in sixteenth-century Istanbul as defined by literary and documentary sources. With its diverse population and as the seat of the Ottoman dynasty, Istanbul was one of the most crowded and diverse cities of the sixteenth century. It witnessed the formation of an elite class that distinguished itself from the majority of the urban population through ideological othering strategies and the establishment of law codes to order and rule the diverse communities in the city. Literary works that focused on the city and documents, including law codes and court records, reflect conflicting views on sexual relations: while chaste love among members of the elite was idealized in romances and sexual acts were criticized in satirical works, documents reflected the ways sexual acts and desires were regulated, controlled, and punished.

This chapter explores water development in the Buhayra province (western Delta), mainly from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, to examine the canal system and how it was developed. Buhayra province, an administrative prefecture in Ottoman Egypt, was located on the route that connected Alexandria to Cairo. From the early Islamic period down to the Mamluk period (1250–1517), the province had seen the development of canals for navigation and irrigation. Although Mamluk sources describe these water development works, we know less about them through the Ottoman period due to a lack of contemporary accounts. The most accessible and seemingly accurate source on the rural landscape is the Napoleonic map from Description de l’Égypte; this map, however, only reflects the landscape at the end of the eighteenth century. Such a situation makes the Ottoman period a blank space in the province’s history. This chapter aims to analyse what happened in the Ottoman period to those canals developed in the Mamluk period to understand, as sequentially as possible, how the canals and the landscape along them changed. The analysis also gives us a glimpse of the fringes of Ottoman rural administration, revealing how the canals were maintained at the time.

This chapter considers civic newspaper poetry in Persian and Azerbaijani Turkic as a site for the establishment of a new radical politics and poetics of representation during and after the entangled Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman revolutions of 1905–1911. In the historiography of Persian and Central Asian literature, these revolutions are generally considered to be catalysts for a literary modernity engaged with European models and genres. This chapter shows how the poetics of new modes of political representation came to be articulated in classical and folk verse forms (qasida, ghazal, lullaby) that had preexisting repertories of tools for establishing, negotiating, and contesting claims to representational legitimacy. Surveying the main types of periodicals (newspaper, literary journal, satirical journal), the chapter shows how poets developed different styles for different venues, focusing on ‘Ali-akbar Sabir, lead poet of the Azerbaijani satirical journal Mulla Nasreddin. The chapter next considers how poets reworked court panegyric to glorify the parliaments and revolutionary parties that contested royal sovereignty, focusing on the newspaper verse of the Iranian poets Abu al-Qasim Lahuti and Adib al-Mamalik. Lastly, the chapter follows the transfer of the allegorical patriotic lullaby from Azerbaijan to Iran, focusing on the role of the Iranian publisher Nasim-i Shumal.

The current countries in the Middle East and North Africa were all formed, or transformed, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century by processes of partitioning and territorialization propelled by European colonial expansion and local responses to those interventions. As the region’s political topography was remapped before and after the First World War, collective identities were activated, reimagined, and mobilized within and across these newly delineated units. From Northern Africa to the Iranian plateau, an array of nationalisms emerged over the course of this transformation, pairing notions of peoplehood and political sovereignty in new frameworks of identity. For the Middle East and North Africa, the related questions “what is a nation?” and “when is the nation?” are best answered by focusing on a third question: how has the nation (and nationalism) worked in the region over the past two centuries?

Focusing on the eighteenth century, this chapter uses the surviving books from the manuscript library of the Buffalo Agency to reveal how Ibadi intellectual, religious, and commercial life in Ottoman Cairo intersected with that of their non-Ibadi contemporaries. Beyond funding the endowment for students at the Buffalo Agency, Ibadi merchants were also often the ones responsible for gifting or commissioning the books in its library. The books themselves included roughly equal numbers of Sunni and Ibadi titles. It traces the relationship of Ibadis with the famous (Sunni) al-Azhar Mosque and how the library of the Buffalo Agency reflects this relationship. In all cases, from the production of books to their endowment and use by students, Ibadis mirror the social and religious trends of their Sunni contemporaries in the Ottoman period.

This chapter examines the last phase of the Buffalo Agency’s existence from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. It refracts this institution’s history through an existing body of historical literature that explores the intersections among print technology, Islamic reform and ecumenicalism, and political life in the history of Ibadi and other Muslims communities in Egypt in the context of colonialism. The chapter examines these themes by telling the stories of two people whose lives are largely unknown. The first figure, Saʿīd al-Shammākhī, served as the director of the Buffalo Agency in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1871, however, he was appointed agent (wakīl) for the Husaynid bey of Tunisia in Egypt and served as a line of communication between the governments of the two Ottoman provinces. The second figure is Muḥammad al-Bārūnī, owner of the first Ibadi printing house in Cairo. In terms of its operation, its financing, and its choice of titles, this Ibadi press functioned in much the same way as other late Ottoman presses in Egypt. Through the stories of these two men, the chapter situates Ibadis in the changing technologies and politics of late nineteenth century Ottoman Egypt.

This chapter presents the Buffalo Agency, a trade agency, school, and library that was owned and operated by Ibadi Muslims in Ottoma-era Cairo. It presents the book’s main argument; namely, that the history of the Buffalo Agency shows how Ibadi Muslims participated fully in the religious, economic, legal, and political life of Ottoman Egypt. Their ability to maintain cohesion as a community while also engaging fully with Ottoman society was in part due to their unusual status as both members of a religious minority and part of the Muslim majority. The chapter then situates this argument in the three conversations to which the book contributes: Ottoman history in Egypt, minority communities in the empire, and the history of Ibadi Islam. The chapter next introduces the main historical sources used to support the argument: shariah court records, manuscript evidence from private libraries, and archival documents. Methodologically, the chapter grapples with the tension between the emphasis on the material history of Ibadis in Egypt and my need to rely on digital facsimiles of many of the sources.

This chapter begins with the arrival of Ibadi student Saʿīd al-Bārūnī in Cairo in 1798, just before the invasion of the French army under Napoleon. It follows the life of Saʿīd in Cairo during the tumultuous decades of the early nineteenth century, including the departure of the French and the rise to power of the Ottoman governor Muḥammad ʿAlī. Following his return to the Maghrib, the chapter continues the story of the Agency by turning to a private letter written to Saʿīd by one of his students, Muḥammad al-Bārūnī, who was studying at the Agency in the 1850s. The books and letters connected to the Agency in this period reveal much about the world of Cairene Ibadis in the mid-nineteenth century, including the state of education at al-Azhar, the changing demographics of the Ibadi community, and signs of a growing relationship between the Ibadi community of the Indian Ocean and that of northern Africa.

This chapter lays out the broad contours of the history of North African migrants to Ottoman Cairo from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. It focuses its attention on both Ibadis and non-Ibadis from the Maghrib residing in Egypt to paint a picture of the world they inhabited. More precisely, it focuses on the Tulun district of the city of Cairo, where the Buffalo Agency was located. Ibadis and other Maghribis bought and sold property in the neighborhood, went shopping in its markets, prayed in its mosque, welcomed friends and family coming from their homeland, and said goodbye to those departing for other Ottoman cities such as Izmir, Istanbul, and Mecca. In drawing attention to these aspects of everyday life, the chapter sheds light on Ibadi and Maghribi communal identity, their remarkably expansive networks in the Mediterranean, their professional and religious lives as Ottomans, and their relationship to the Ottoman government as it changed over these centuries.

This chapter demonstrates how Ibadis, whether merchants or scholars, participated in the everyday legal life of Ottoman Cairo by using its shariah courts. It does so by focusing on two Ibadis living in seventeenth-century Cairo: a merchant named ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Baḥḥār and a scholar named Muḥammad Abī Sitta. The variety of ways in which both men used the court system demonstrates its importance to Ibadi merchants and scholars in the Ottoman period. The chapter’s overarching theme is how Ibadis used the legal tools of Ottoman Cairo, waqf property, and inheritance courts to navigate their everyday lives.

The relationship between Etruria and Anatolia has been an important topic since Herodotus asserted a Lydian origin for the Etruscans. Seen as the first civilization within the Italian peninsula, the Etruscans held a pivotal place in Italian history, and therefore their origin has held larger political implications for the modern peoples of Italy and Anatolia. This chapter contrasts the historiography of the term “Orientalizing” within Etruria with the evolving presentation of the history of civilization in Ottoman and later Turkish Anatolia. The term “Orientalizing” was a project in orientalism, defining the beginning of Western civilization as it was born from earlier Eastern civilizations, and its historic explanations were used for nationalistic ends. In addition, modern colonialism shaped how Eastern influence in Etruria was conceptualized and guided Italian archaeological missions in the Aegean. In Italy and Anatolia, understandings of their ancient interactions have been influenced by modern political ideologies that sought to assert where civilization originated and how it spread throughout Europe.

The second chapter addresses three case studies that position masjids as spaces that reflect processes of compromise, concession, and sometimes intervention as it concerns heritage. The first case study explores how the shrine and mosque structures of the holy city of Harar Jugol (Ethiopia) serve as both spiritual touchstones and important Islamic heritage sites, and, in doing so, reflect the problems involved in how these sites negotiate these dual realities. The second case study focuses on the Muslim community of New Gourna, designed by Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy, which was meant to function both as a sustainable community and as a celebration of Egypt’s architectural, cultural, and spiritual legacies, but ultimately failed. Interestingly, Fathy would transplant these ideas in a later masjid project located in Abiquiú, New Mexico, raising questions about the so-called “embeddedness” of heritage traditions. The third case study also references this aspect with regards to contemporary spiritual architectural imports like “Neo-Ottoman”-style mosques into African space. This was recently realized in Ghana’s new National Mosque, located in the capital city of Accra, which eschews Ghana’s historical mosque-building traditions and raises questions with regards to who the stakeholders are in decisions about what constitutes heritage and what does not.

Part V integrates the different strands in the previous chapters to explain how they account for why representation consolidated in England but not in the non-Western cases. Existing accounts typically focus on the lack of certain cultural templates, whether corporate bodies and estates or corporations. Two alternatives are first examined, namely that the difference can be explained by the absence of two of the main components of representative emergence in the English case, the principle of representation itself and the demand for justice mediated through petitions. Both Russia and the Ottoman Empire exhibited both traits, however. So then the chapter revises the common assumption that western representation depended on greater corporate rights and on the end of collective responsibility. Rather, the critical difference was that the English state was better able to resist the demands of groups for corporate privileges, at least in the period of parliamentary emergence, and to impose collective responsibility on a state-derived (rather than tradition-based) basis. This power is exemplified by its capacity to tax the nobility, which, as we have seen other European leaders were generally unable to do.

The question whether conditionality is sufficient for representation is answered in this chapter in the negative through the Ottoman case . The striking and unnoted similarities between the Ottoman land regime and that of England are examined here in detail. They show that a central feature of the Ottoman regime--that all land "belonged" to the sultan--has not received the appropriate comparative treatment. The chapter highlights the similarities between the understanding of private property and conditional state control of land in the Hanafi and Ottoman legal systems and that of England. It contrasts the western patrimonial concept of a fief to that of the Ottoman bureaucratic timar, to show that they are different types of rights. It analyzes the similarities in peasant rights over land. It also shows the strikingly similar responses to state control of land in the two systems, uses and vakifs, as well as the state responses to their expansion. The comparison shows that the two regimes do not differ so much in the type of property rights they secured--and certainly not in their absence in the Ottoman case--but in the capacity of the state to enforce them and to create centralized institutions that regulated them.

The chapter follows the transformation of kabbalistic life that took place in the sixteenth century, especially in Safed. The Ottoman context (including Sufi influences) is addressed. The main circles covered here are those of R. Yosef Karo, R. Moshe Cordovero and (most extensively) R. Itzhak Luria. The examination of theurgical-mythical themes continues here, alongside new psychological theories of the soul and messianic visions of both history and cosmos. Views of femininity and sexuality are explored, as well as the psychology of the mystical fellowship as a new social form and accompanying techniques and experiences, forming what the chapter's conclusion describes as a mystical culture. In the literary domain, particular emphasis is placed on the roles of print and exegesis (especially around the Zohar), as well as poetics.The interrelationship of all these innovations accounts for the staggering complexity of the Safedian doctrine (accounting for the intensive commentary it received in later generations). One of the main contributions of the chapter is that of familiarizing readers with the unique terminology of this system.