Διάλεξη του κ. Ümit Kurt (University of Newcastle NSW, Αυστραλία) με τίτλο The Ecumenical Empire: Marginal Bodies and Inter-Ethnic Relations in the Late Ottoman Empire
The Ecumenical Empire: Marginal Bodies and Inter-Ethnic Relations in the Late Ottoman Empire
In the last decade, historiography has copiously documented instances of violence during the final years of the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, we have reached a point in which what has been less accounted for is the resistance to violence or communal collaborations. This talk offers an examination of those times when violence might have felt what would come next and it didn’t. The story begins, curiously enough, with sex in a bathhouse. In his groundbreaking book, Age of Coexistence, rather than viewing the Arab world as a place of age-old sectarian animosities, historian Ussama Makdisi described the forming of a complex system of coexistence, what he called the “ecumenical frame.” It was an analytical concept to show how ethnically and religiously diverse regions “created a modern culture of coexistence and Muslim-Christian political collaboration amid Ottoman reformation, European colonialism, and the emergence of nationalism.” I take Makdisi’s argument one step further and contends that traces of the same “ecumenical frame” can be found not only in the Ottoman south (otherwise known as al-Mashriq or Greater Syria) but in other parts of the empire and manifest itself through the absence of (or resistance to) violence. Taking as its inspiration Makdisi’s “ecumenical frame” of an imperfect but durable coexistence in the Ottoman Mashriq, I examine an incident that, in other contexts of the period, could have quickly boiled over into riots and massacres. Despite relentless efforts and meddling of an Ottoman statesman, I demonstrate how the framework for coexistence gained the upper hand even when the incident of inter-ethnic, perhaps violent, sex could have caused riots similar to those elsewhere in the empire. This talk makes an important contribution to the study of communal relations in the late Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East, as it reveals how imperial variations and local ethnic constellations mattered in restraining intercommunal violence and defy the broad strokes of universal inter-ethnic tensions at the end of the empire.