Reading Clocks Alla Turca

Download or read book Reading Clocks, Alla Turca written by Avner Wishnitzer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-07-07 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading Clocks, Alla Turca explores the technological and social aspects of Ottoman temporal culture, where religious and secular powers competed and colluded for authority, the army tried to rationalize its systems of training and communication, and schoolboys complained about how long classes were. The conflicts that played out on the field of temporal systems were not along the axes one might expect, with secular, urban, rationalist, modernizing, and Europeanizing forces arrayed against rural, traditional, religious, and nationalist people and parties. Rather, religious institutions saw the rationalization of temporal culture as a way to extend their authority (the muezzin s call to prayer was the traditional way of counting the hours of the day, after all), and urban elites proclaimed their nationalism and their religiosity by their watches, both timepiece and jewelry. The image of Europe was, in a mirror of European Orientalism, deployed as both a rationalist model to be emulated (by, for example, the military) and a negative model of lazy and late aristocratic carelessness (by government administrators). Exploring sources as varied as lyric poetry, military manuals, school and military memoirs, and ferry timetables, Avner Wishnitzer lays out the full richness of Ottoman temporal culture in the nineteenth century."

Download or read book Reading Clocks, Alla Turca written by Avner Wishnitzer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-07-07 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Up until the end of the eighteenth century, the way Ottomans used their clocks conformed to the inner logic of their own temporal culture. However, this began to change rather dramatically during the nineteenth century, as the Ottoman Empire was increasingly assimilated into the European-dominated global economy and the project of modern state building began to gather momentum. In Reading Clocks, Alla Turca, Avner Wishnitzer unravels the complexity of Ottoman temporal culture and for the first time tells the story of its transformation. He explains that in their attempt to attain better surveillance capabilities and higher levels of regularity and efficiency, various organs of the reforming Ottoman state developed elaborate temporal constructs in which clocks played an increasingly important role. As the reform movement spread beyond the government apparatus, emerging groups of officers, bureaucrats, and urban professionals incorporated novel time-related ideas, values, and behaviors into their self-consciously “modern” outlook and lifestyle. Acculturated in the highly regimented environment of schools and barracks, they came to identify efficiency and temporal regularity with progress and the former temporal patterns with the old political order. Drawing on a wealth of archival and literary sources, Wishnitzer’s original and highly important work presents the shifting culture of time as an arena in which Ottoman social groups competed for legitimacy and a medium through which the very concept of modernity was defined. Reading Clocks, Alla Turca breaks new ground in the study of the Middle East and presents us with a new understanding of the relationship between time and modernity.

Download or read book As Night Falls written by Avner Wishnitzer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-01 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a world that is constantly awake, illuminated and exposed, there is much to gain from looking into the darkness of times past. This fascinating and vivid picture of nocturnal life in Middle Eastern cities shows that the night in the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire created unique conditions for economic, criminal, political, devotional and leisurely pursuits that were hardly possible during the day. Offering the possibility of livelihood and brotherhood, pleasure and refuge; the darkness allowed confiding, hiding and conspiring - activities which had far-reaching consequences on Ottoman state and society in the early modern period. Instead of dismissing the night as merely a dark corridor between days, As Night Falls demonstrates how fundamental these nocturnal hours have been in shaping the major social, cultural and political processes in the early modern Middle East.

Download or read book The Time of Turāth written by Harald Jacob Viersen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-11-13 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Labors of Love written by Susanna Ferguson and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2024-09-03 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to raise a child became a central concern of intellectual debate from Cairo to Beirut over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Intimately linked with discussions around capitalism and democracy, considerations about women, gender, and childrearing emerged as essential to modern social theory. Arab writers, particularly women, made sex, the body, and women's ethical labor central to fending off European imperial advances, instituting representative politics, and managing social order. Labors of Love traces the political power of motherhood and childrearing in Arabic thought. Susanna Ferguson reveals how debates around raising children became foundational to feminist, Islamist, and nationalist politics alike—opening up conversations about civilization, society, freedom, temporality, labor, and democracy. While these debates led to expansions in girls' education and women writers' authority, they also attached the fate of nations to women's unwaged labor in the home. Ferguson thus reveals why women and the family have been stumbling blocks for representative regimes around the world. She shows how Arab women's writing speaks to global questions—the devaluation of social reproduction under capitalism, the stubborn maleness of the liberal subject, and why the naturalization of embodied, binary gender difference has proven so difficult to overcome.

Download or read book Sacred Place and Sacred Time in the Medieval Islamic Middle East written by Talmon-Heller Daniella Talmon-Heller and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-18 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a fresh perspective on religious culture in the medieval Middle East. It investigates the ways Muslims thought about and practiced at sacred spaces and in sacred times through two detailed case studies: the shrines in honour of the head of al-Husayn (the martyred grandson of the Prophet), and the holy month of Rajab. The changing expressions of the veneration of the shrine and month are followed from the formative period of Islam until the late Mamluk period, paying attention to historical contexts and power relations. Readers will find interest in the attempt to integrate the two perspectives synchronically and diachronically, in a discussion of the relationship between the sanctification of space and time in individual and communal piety, and in the religious literature of the period.

Download or read book On Time written by On Barak and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this pioneering history of transportation and communication in the modern Middle East, On Barak argues that contrary to accepted wisdom technological modernity in Egypt did not drive a sense of time focused on standardization only. Surprisingly, the introduction of the steamer, railway, telegraph, tramway, and telephone in colonial Egypt actually triggered the development of unique timekeeping practices that resignified and subverted the typical modernist infatuation with expediency and promptness. These countertempos, predicated on uneasiness over “dehumanizing” European standards of efficiency, sprang from and contributed to non-linear modes of arranging time. Barak shows how these countertempos formed and developed with each new technological innovation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, contributing to a particularly Egyptian sense of time that extends into the present day, exerting influence over contemporary political language in the Arab world. The universal notion of a modern mechanical standard time and the deviations supposedly characterizing non-Western settings “from time immemorial,” On Time provocatively argues, were in fact mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing.