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4. THE PUBLIC SPHERE AND CIVIL SOCIETY IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
- State University of New York Press
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CHAPTER FOUR THE PUBLIC SPHERE AND CIVIL SOCIETY IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE HAIM GERBER One of the more popular topics in historical sociology in recent years has been that of civil society or, more precisely, the attempt to trace autonomous aspects in earlier societies. Strong impulses in this direction have been the globally felt drive toward democratization and, more recently, the democratization of Eastern Europe. A useful added dimension to the discourse on civil society has been the topic of public sphere, which may be loosely defined as the area of societal activity that is relevant to the social and political order in general.1 This addition links the sphere of autonomous social institutions and groups to the state in a more direct manner, and makes the topic of greater interest to the political sociology–inclined social historian. The idea of public sphere is also important in that it allows areas of social activity to be brought into the discussion, rather than just groups in the narrow sense. These new approaches make the society itself the focus of study, though historians prefer to look at the political side of that society. Another approach that is striving to capture adjacent territory is the “new cultural history,” which seeks to assign an enhanced place to the symbolic and cultural aspects of a society and see them as the constitutive elements of the social structure, rather than as unimportant derivatives of material conditions, as was customary a generation ago.2 The Middle East is unquestionably an important focus for such studies. On the one hand, the number of studies anticipating democratization of Middle Eastern regimes is growing, though limited for the time being to explaining the difficulties involved in this process.3 I have also tried my hand at such explanations. In my Social Origins of the Modern Middle East4 I argued that it was social relations rooted in agrarian practices that determined the rise of a landed magnate class in the Middle East since the mid-nineteenth century and its fall shortly after World War II. I also attributed the democratic developments in Turkey to the absence in that country of a nationally important 65 landed ruling elite comparable to those that appeared in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. While these arguments seem to me as cogent today as they were ten years ago, I admit that this explanation is only partial. Other sociocultural institutions and traditions must also be investigated and brought into the picture . Thus, in the study of the social origins of Western democracy no one can afford to neglect the role of chartered medieval towns in creating the preconditions for the emergence of modern Western democracy. Such considerations make comparable Islamic institutions of evident interest to the social historian . This chapter will seek out such institutions and spheres in the history of the Ottoman Empire, and will make an effort to look at them through the eyes of the new cultural history rather than of the traditional social historian. STATE AND SOCIETY IN CLASSICAL ISLAM AND THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE I shall suggest here a new conceptualization of the role of the state in the Ottoman Empire vis-à-vis civil society. In some important ways this relationship between the state and the society constitutes a major break with traditional Islam, a break that has not hitherto been fully analyzed. On the whole, the pre-Ottoman Islamic Middle East was characterized by alienation and deep animosity between the political authority and the society—or at least its prominent representatives, the `ulama'. This alienation was due to structural causes that are rather well known, so that a summary of the issue will suffice here.5 The starting point is that the state had no independent basis in Islam. An independent basis was accorded only to the umma, the community of believers, which was supposed to live not by the commands of the ruler but by the shari`a, the sacred law of Islam. This law was to be known through the Qur'an and the deeds and sayings of the Prophet, as reported by his Companions. The ruler had no role in this theoretical framework, though the situation was complicated by the fact that the first four rulers, or caliphs, were also Companions, who certainly did exert an effort to gain a say in fixing the contours of the community.6 The religious nature of these rulers was accentuated by the fact that it was they who won for Islam the main...