A second preliminary remark is that, while the sources available do not quite constitute an embarrassment of riches, it would be a grave injustice to underplay the importance of the three authors whose works are analyzed in {160|161} this chapter, and their place in the pantheon of Ottoman Arab authors of the long nineteenth century. To put it succinctly, Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq (1804?–1887), Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā (1865–1935), and Jirjī Zaydān (1860–1914) were seminal, highly influential thinkers, authors, and self-appointed reformists, whose writings and ideas were foundational and formative of the entire infrastructure of the nahda during the period under study. All three were the founders and (quasi-exclusive) writers of widely disseminated periodicals that were read in the four corners of the Arabic-speaking world and beyond, including India. More biographical information will be provided below, but suffice it here to underline one major difference among them: Shidyāq lived in Istanbul for a quarter of a century (1860–1884), and it was then that he wrote and published the articles on Istanbul discussed here; Riḍā stayed in Istanbul around 1909 for about a year, and he published his articles on the city in his periodical al-Manār a few months upon his return to Cairo; and Zaydān merely spent a few days there, also in 1909, and scribbled (rather undecipherable) notes in his notebooks, much of which was later turned into a historical/contemporary novel he published on the Young Turk Revolution (entitled al-Inqilāb al-‘uthmāni, or The Ottoman Revolution). He first serialized this novel in his periodical al-Hilāl before publishing it as a book in 1911. Hence, the amount of time these authors spent in the city—and subsequently, the amount of deep knowledge they had of it—differed considerably from one author to another, and so did the amount of ink they devoted to writing on Istanbul. The reasons that brought them to Istanbul also varied considerably, and unsurprisingly shaped what they chose to see and comment upon during their stay in the empire’s capital. Finally, one very quick word about comparisons: travel literature, or writing about a “foreign” place or even a second home, seems to be implicitly or explicitly, consciously or unconsciously, comparative. One of the major themes that permeate through this chapter is comparison: what is Istanbul being compared to? How does it fare in the comparison? How does the comparison change, from one author to another? And how might we be able to interpret this comparison? 

In the context of such massive and visible urban projects, it is no surprise that Shidyāq covered urban matters in his periodical, weaving descriptions and comments on the city’s streets, its inhabitants, zoning, provisioning, coffeehouses, places of leisure, consumption, and housing, and constantly shifting his {163|164} zoom between the minutely micro and the massively macro. It is partly through Shidyāq’s writings on the city that his genius as publicist, political essayist, and modernist novelist becomes apparent.

For Shidyāq, one of the main duties of newspapers was to suggest practical and useful urban improvements within the larger realm of public interest. In his mind, nothing that pertained to public interest was beyond newspapers’ scrutiny or was unworthy of their attention. More so, reform was not limited to the grand and the monumental: all aspects of life, daily governance, and public interest could and should be reformed. The changes Shidyāq suggested had the potential to impact the lives of vast numbers of Istanbul’s inhabitants, not only Europeans and Ottoman subjects living in Pera and Galata, and not exclusively the upper classes. Strikingly, while the changes he suggested were quite radical, they did not make away with the many institutions and practices that had regulated the lives of Istanbulis for centuries. They were also universalizable: they could be applied to any city in the Ottoman Empire, without requiring tremendous funds or labor. Shidyāq envisioned and articulated a blueprint of urban reforms throughout the empire, which would first be implemented in the empire’s capital.

Shidyāq’s articles depicted Istanbul in the quotidian. It was predominantly the city of its inhabitants, rather than the dazzling metropole of an empire—and of inhabitants generally unmarked by religion or ethnicity, going about their neighborhood or beyond, busying themselves in unglamorous activities. None of the grandeur of the city was made manifest, no monuments commented upon or even deserving a mention. No frisson either, at crossing the Bosphorus or catching sight of one of the mosques at sunset. Istanbul is almost absent from its description, and Shidyāq might as well be writing about any city in the (Ottoman) world. His preoccupation was first and foremost with the mundane, the unspectacular and the non-glorious: people’s commute and transportation, public spaces, coffeehouses, and neighborhood provisioning.

This “banalization” of Istanbul—as well as the emphasis on the non-picturesque—was certainly partly due to the fact that Shidyāq was a resident of the city, and not a visitor. It was also connected to the genre of writing, namely newspaper articles: as previously mentioned, newspapers (in Istanbul, in other parts of the Ottoman Empire, and in the four corners of the world generally) closely followed urban matters, including reporting on municipal activities, and provided ample details on rather prosaic topics. Shidyāq was writing as a local journalist, but what is interesting is that his readership was probably overwhelmingly non-local. It was predominantly people from the Arab provinces and beyond—in Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and elsewhere—who read his articles. Perhaps the banalization of Istanbul was connected to his readership: Shidyāq might have intended to “demystify” the capital of the empire to its provincial subjects, and treat it on par with the rest of the empire’s cities, almost provincialize it in fact. He might also have been suggesting that all these questions facing Istanbul in the 1860s faced or would face other cities in the empire, and therefore that Istanbul was a good case-study, or a laboratory for analyzing these mechanisms of modern daily life. 

Istanbul, in Riḍā’s articles, emerged as a set of personal landmarks or a network of connections: influential people he met, visited, and talked to, who could help him realize his vision. His account reads like a Who’s Who of Istanbul: a web of its most influential ulama, officials, educators, notables, and bureaucrats. Beyond these reformers of the umma, Riḍā had little to say about the city itself, but what he did say, as well as what he omitted, is quite telling. First, while acknowledging the unbeatable location of the city, he hastily began to enumerate what the city lacked: “Besides mosques, one cannot find a single trace of the ancient buildings of the previous sultans … and no modern structures except for caserns and military schools … Sofia, Athens and Cairo are all more refined (arqā). Istanbul … is one big military encampment/ barracks (mu‘askar), with a continuous and visible presence of soldiers” (ibid., 53). While Riḍā might have disapproved of such overt military power, his prime concern lay elsewhere. The empire’s leaders had to be capable of building it and developing its infrastructure without relying on the West: “not with loans from foreigners, with interest rates (ribā) that went against the sharī‘a, placed the Empire under European control, and provided them with a pretext … to intervene” (ibid.). Hence, Riḍā’s concern was with the manner in which space was produced: what power relations, what economic and political asymmetries were inevitably tied to urban development, in an empire struggling to fend off European interests.

Turning his attention to the city’s moral and intellectual infrastructure, Riḍā compared education and instruction (‘ilm wa adab) in Istanbul with Egyptian and Syrian cities, and broached the subject by focusing on women. Education in Istanbul might be more widespread and comprehensive, he pointed out, and women were better educated and more refined, but this was (partly) the consequence of provincial over-taxation and corrupt rule, the metropole essentially siphoning off wealth from the provinces during Hamidian rule. In Istanbul, he mused, “one never catches a glance of an uncovered woman in a window or on a roof; and one does not hear loud voices in houses, in the markets or on the streets, the way one does in Cairo.” Overall, women in Istanbul both privately and publicly behaved in a most appropriate and modest manner, providing they were educated (but not necessarily schooled) à l’ancienne, whereas the modern manners and the tremendous dangers of tafarnuj (Europeanization), threatened to corrupt Islamic households (ibid., 54). Riḍā saw the empire’s capital as being made out of two irreconcilable cities: Istanbul on one hand, and Galata and Beyoǧlu on the other. While the distance between them was minimal, they represented two different, virtually unbridgeable, worlds. Istanbul resembled Tripoli in its customs and habits, especially in dress and dinner habits, whereas Galata’s residents dressed differently and stayed up late. Contrary to his expectations, he noted (perhaps with a tinge of disappointment?) that Istanbul was {171|172} not more refined, more built, and more civilized than Syrian cities; it simply had more men and women educated in social manners (al-ādāb al-ijtimā‘iyya) than Syrian cities. However, its modern buildings and civilization were not more refined than Beirut’s, nor were its older structures more distinguished than those of Damascus. Where Istanbul fared better in the comparison was, interestingly enough, in its commoners: Riḍā found Istanbul’s commoners or its masses (al-‘āmma) more polished than Cairo’s. However, in wealth and buildings, or when it came to the city’s elites, Cairo was superior, and Cairene women were virtually on par with their Istanbuli counterparts (ibid., 55).

For Zaydān, Istanbul was the stage for History with a capital H, namely the revolution of 1908. Muwayliḥi’s narrative had described a static, atemporal city, stuck in a web of tyranny, corruption, and intrigue, with no history to write of, {174|175} and no visible future in sight. Riḍā’s writings on Istanbul made no mention of 1908—besides qualifying 1909 as “Year One”—and the city for him was first and foremost a node within Dar al-Islam, albeit a central one. Shidyāq’s Istanbul was predominantly the city of the quotidian and the uneventful. Zaydān’s Istanbul, however, was primarily the stage of the empire’s revolutionary heroes, and most importantly of its thinkers: he included the names of the Committee of Union and Progress’s members for 1906 and 1909, provided physical and psychological descriptions of them, and jotted down meetings he had with some of them.  He also described the building housing the Majlis al-Mab‘uthān, the much-celebrated Council of Representatives/Delegates and one of the major achievements of the 1908 Revolution, and provided information on the Council’s activities. Other historical events also made an appearance in Zaydān’s fragmented notes, usually prompted by a site or a place: a monument, a building, a neighborhood. One neighborhood, for instance, “contains the remains of Russian soldiers who died in the war of 1877” (ibid.).

Like Shidyāq’s articles, Zaydān’s notes unraveled layer after layer of the city’s history without hierarchy or linear progression. He interwove past, present, and future, the sacred and the profane, the grand and the humble, the quotidian and the eventful, stringing together snapshots of the city: that of “a bear and a monkey with their master”; Roberts College and the villages of Bebek and Istiniye; Eyüp, its main mosque and the footprint of the Prophet on one of the walls; the Patriarchate in Fener; reading rooms cum-coffeehouses (“qirāatkhāna, by which they mean coffeeshops”); the archeological museum and some of its artifacts such as the tomb of Alexander; the Süleymaniye mosque and the Mosque of Sultan Ahmed. The effect is somewhere between a guidebook and a peep-box. Interspersed among these scenes were women carrying loaves of bread, notes on how the residents of Istanbul announced their dead, lists of the most important Istanbul newspapers, description of house interiors and exteriors, ethnological information on various ethnic groups living in the city (dress, profession, and the like), and a quick description of the slave market (sūq al-jawārī). Zaydān did not only dwell on the picturesque, though. He recorded with interest and pride the various kinds of schools, including military schools, colleges of medicine, and teachers’ colleges, and noted the various languages of instruction. Istanbul’s modernity is given its due: Hayderpaşa, the railway station and the Istanbul-Baghdad railroad (he noted that the trains at Hayderpaşa ran on electricity); the city’s paved streets, with imported stones (“similar to those imported to Egypt from Trieste”). While he included virtually the entire panoply of nineteenth-century modern institutions—the museum, the municipality, the newspaper, the train station—he intertwined them with pre-nineteenth-century spaces and practices: transportation carts, pulled by cows {175|176} and buffalos, coexisting with the modern railway; the spring (‘ayn) in Üsküdar, from which people still got their water and carried it in barrels to the city; the sumptuous interiors of westernized elites, who decorated their homes with European paintings (ṣuwar ifranjiyya) as well as oriental carpets. There was no value judgment, implicit or explicit, no hierarchy, and no dichotomy. However, functional Islamic institutions and figures, ulama, sufi lodges, and madrasas, remained glaringly absent from his tableaux vivants.

Zaydān was not only (or perhaps even chiefly) concerned with the fate of Parisian women. The proliferation of prostitutes, especially in the Quartier Latin, threatened the well-being and morality of another group of people who mattered infinitely more to him: Egyptian students on governmental educational missions (irsāliyyāt). The Parisian street was thus a space of moral contamination for the Egyptians, and it could potentially affect all of Egypt (ibid., 48). Interestingly, he blamed the Egyptian government, as well as the families of those studying in Paris, for sending Egyptian boys to study in Paris, and thus exposing them to these dangers; other parts of France were a lot safer, he opined, and this is where students should be dispatched. 

Women aside, though, Paris for Zaydān was clearly the capital of high civilization in ways Istanbul was not. At one point in these articles, he abandoned the seemingly objective lens through which he was noting difference and comparing East and West mostly in terms of buildings and infrastructure, and “acknowledged” the East’s debt to France. Like others of his generation, he had internalized the Orientalist argument that Bonaparte’s conquest of Egypt in 1798 had brought knowledge and progress to the East, and argued that “the seeds which he [Bonaparte] planted remained there until they were cultivated by men from the East who rose from their slumber/awoke (nahaḍū) … the Syrians (sic), Egyptians, Turks and Persians, when they sought out and busied themselves with this civilization (madaniyya), were mostly being inspired by the French and followed the footsteps of the French nation. They learned its language, translated its body of knowledge, and imitated its literature and customs and habits.” He also listed the most prominent French personalities who left their mark on Egypt culturally and scientifically: Dr. Clot Bey, and the founder of the Egyptian museum Mariette Pasha among others, and reminded his readers that “when the Turks rose/awoke (nahḍa) in Istanbul to embrace modern civilization, they mostly relied on translating modern literature (al-adab) from French: Rousseau, Montesquieu, Hugo and others” (ibid., 52).