This chapter focuses on populations that did not participate in the uprising. It uses quantitative event data to identify sites and local communities that stayed out of contention or entered it significantly later than others with similar characteristics. One of the clearest trends in the data is that non-Sunni communities participated little in the uprising. The chapter highlights the role of mechanisms of “in-group policing” enabled by group-level institutions and networks in generating this quiescence. It then examines mechanisms impelling nonparticipation among segments of the ethnic majority population; the event data indicate that many Sunni Arab localities saw strikingly little contentious activity in the early weeks and months of the uprising. These populations include local communities structured around extended family and tribal networks and individuals linked to the state through its corporatist economic development strategies. Finally, the chapter examines countermobilization, including counterdemonstrations, “popular committees” formed to defend neighborhoods from shadowy enemies, and pro-regime paramilitaries known colloquially as shabbiha.

This chapter visits sketches the contours of an “Ottoman lighting system,” that is, a centrally regulated network that procured lighting materials from the provinces and channeled them to Istanbul and other crucial points in the imperial power grid and set lighting priorities in line with its political needs. The main argument is that lighting was considered a basic commodity and its regular supply therefore concerned the state. Yet, access to light was extremely unequal, which, as shown in the next chapter, made light a shiny index of power.

Hearing without seeing, or without seeing well, was one of the defining experiences of the preindustrial night. This chapter seeks to capture something of this experience. It follows darkness as it fell, from sunset to bedtime, beginning with an attempt to “listen around,” or to reconstruct the aural texture of the everynight. While hearing was much more important than during the day for information and orientation, it could not compensate for the loss of vision. The deep darkness of the early modern city undermined people’s sense of control, aggravating fears of very real nocturnal dangers. Discussion accompanies people as they were readying themselves to sleep and shows that even at home, fears and real dangers could shake people’s security and disturb their peace. But while nocturnal threats, fears, and nuisances seem universal, their effect was highly differential, since it depended on the means one could use to cope with them. My second argument is therefore that sleep did not necessarily emancipate people from diurnal social hierarchies and material conditions. They remained unequal even in their beds.

This chapter gives an overview of the book in how it deals with dignity in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution in the context of the Arab Uprisings. Dignity or karama in Arabic is a nebulous concept that challenges us to reflect about various issues such as identity, human rights, and faith. This chapter shows that the research to write this book was prompted by the complexity of dignity demands at a time when the region of North Africa and the Middle East was drifting in the socio-political event of the “Arab Spring” or Arab Uprisings. The main motivation in the research was to investigate understandings of karama in the specific context of Egypt during the 2011 protests. To do so, the focus was on interviews with participants in the 2011 protests and analysis of art forms that emerged during protests and in which there was an explicit expression of dignity/lack of dignity. The chapter presents the argument and contribution of the book, the importance of terminology and layers of meanings, and finally the wider context for dignity slogans. The chapter ends by presenting the book structure and the thematic chapters.

Seeking to limit potentially invisible, incontrollable activity, official decrees, neighborhood communities, guilds, and moralists together created a powerful discourse that stigmatized the night, and a set of regulations aimed to impose visibility on those who nevertheless went out after dark. Yet, with vision impaired, the night continued to pose a challenge to urban order, and the authorities at times applied harsh punitive measures in order to project fear. These demonstrations of formal violence were meant to somewhat compensate for the rulers’ actually rather precarious control over the dark city.

This chapter shows how the loosely regulated night of the eighteenth century, that had accommodated orthodox and antinomian ritual, order, and its transgression, gradually turned into a battleground between the palace elite and the janissaries, the unofficial rulers of the night. When at conflict with the palace, the janissaries used the night not only for licentious pleasures and business, but also for conspiracy and sabotage, as a crucial facet in their “protocols of rebellion.” Once activated, the janissaries’ networks would organize quickly under the cover of darkness and march out of the shadows to confront the sultan in broad daylight. Ottoman sultans, on their part, occasionally tried to dislodge these networks, significantly in this context, by eradicating the nightlife scene which they considered the breeding ground of janissary revolts. These efforts, however, were thwarted by the dependency of the authorities on, and the ambivalence toward these very networks and activities. The drama is narrated below in three acts of major upheavals: the 1730 rebellion, the nizam-i cedid reforms and the 1807 uprising that undid them, and the destruction of the janissaries in 1826, which opened the way to significant changes in Ottoman nocturnal realities.