Moral Crisis in the Ottoman Empire: Society, Politics, and Gender during WWI by Çiğdem Oğuz (review)

In an era of total war and destruction, the Ottoman Empire was also in the middle of a "moral crisis," as Çiğdem Oğuz explores in her groundbreaking book. It is an insightful and well-researched book that sheds light on a critical period in Ottoman history. By examining the social, political, and gender dynamics of the empire amid the Great War, a time when the empire faced significant challenges and transformations, Oğuz's book brings into bold relief neglected episodes of Ottoman history.

Based on her PhD dissertation, Oğuz's book is divided into five chapters and a wellorganized introduction. Chapter 2 explores the intellectual aspects of the moral crisis in which the Ottoman Empire breathed. Oğuz concentrates on the contemporary Ottoman intelligentsia's debates over the Ottoman moral decline. To unravel the contested topic of morality in the eyes of the intellectual circles, Oğuz examines the Journal of Islam (İslam Mecmuası), the New Journal (Yeni Mecmua), and Straight Road (Sebilürreşad), which belong to different ideological spectra. Throughout this chapter Oğuz delves into how morality became a contested topic among the Ottoman intelligentsia and to what extent it was used in political debates.

Oğuz highlights that the Great War's conditions brought a new space in understanding the moral crisis, and morality became one of the most politicized concepts for not only the Ottoman Empire but also other belligerents (42–44). Although the concept of morality and the topic of moral crisis had a prominent place in intellectual circles throughout the history of the empire, Oğuz offers wider definitions and different implications in understanding morality and moral crisis during World War I. While all these intellectuals from different ideologies were searching for any remedy to recover the empire by curing its moral decay, their views on solutions and the sources of the problem differed. As Oğuz articulates, wartime conditions brought new opportunities for the Ottoman intelligentsia to shape the empire's future society by attending to debates on morality. Moral anxieties among the circles of Ottoman intelligentsia became a tool in the state's penetration into the "private" realm of the family. At that time, nationalists advocated for social reform to improve the status of women within the family. In contrast, political Islamists employed the concept of moral decay to regain dominance over public spaces and establish Islamic moral authority.

Chapter 3 deals with the Ottoman Empire's regulatory attempts to strengthen its political realm to protect and supervise public morality. Oğuz highlights two significant breaking points for this intense policy shift: the unilateral abolition of commercial and legal capitulations and the expansion of military power into every corner of the state and society due to the extension of martial law. After the abrogation of the capitulations, the empire found an opportunity and legal base to start a hunt for traffickers of women and prostitutes with the motive of protecting national security and public order. Throughout this chapter Oğuz examines not only correspondence between civil and military authorities but also petitions written by persecuted people to understand how Ottoman state officials implemented specific measures against the violation of public morality, intending to protect national security. Petitions, in particular, provide a new perspective to follow lively stories in which banished and persecuted people survive (78). Furthermore, Oğuz underlines that the empire conducted different types of investigations for citizenship applications, emphasizing their "moral qualities."

Detecting an immoral enemy during wartime was one of the essential components of war strategies, discourses, and state propaganda, which were not unique to the Ottoman Empire. During the Great War belligerent states used morality in different discursive and practical manners for not only detecting immoral groups on the home front but also demonizing the other(s)—the enemy nations—to justify the war against their moral inferiority (70, 85–86). Oğuz's...