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.

This chapter focuses on the theme of dignity as identity and particularly Arab identity. One of the important components in the construction of nationality is consolidating a sense of identity. Karama/dignity – in the sense of being an image of God with inherent worth – has supported for millennia a sense of identity for humans. In the discussion of karama as identity in the slogans of the 2011 Arab Uprisings in Egypt, the chapter shows that there is a widespread understanding of the lack of dignity in Arab contexts, mostly due to oppressive political regimes in a postcolonial setting, which can be seen through various expressions of karama as identity in arts and in the interviews. The chapter also highlights how identity politics are also essential to increasingly globalized societal contexts around the world.

Darkness offered economically underprivileged and socially marginal groups livelihood and leisure opportunities that were hardly available during the day. These populations therefore figured prominently in the city’s nocturnal life. But the night offered cover also to the “respectable” residents of the city, and to its rulers. Darkness indeed had a blinding effect, but it also made it easier to turn a blind eye. Whereas infringements in broad daylight were a direct challenge to established order, it was often comfortable for all parties to pretend nighttime violations never happened. Both order and its alleged enemies, could more easily transgress their bounds at night, assuming that what happened in the dark remained in the dark. Throughout most of the eighteenth century, a huge nightlife scene was allowed to exist, as long as it remained out of sight and did not openly undermine diurnal order.

In a world that is constantly awake, illuminated, and exposed there is much to gain from looking into the darkness of times past. Paradoxically, the most significant thing that studying Ottoman nights allows us to see, is the benefits and costs of invisibility. This book shows that the night in the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire created unique conditions for economic, criminal, political, devotional, and leisurely pursuits that were hardly possible during the day. It offered livelihood and brotherhood, pleasure and refuge; it allowed confiding, hiding, and conspiring. It was the ability to keep out of sight that created all these opportunities. To be “in the dark” surely involved the insecurity of not knowing, but also the promise of not being known, and the benefits of pretending not to know. This hide-ability, as I argue in this book, had far-reaching consequences on Ottoman state and society in the Early Modern period.

This chapter focuses on the theme of dignity as a human right. There is first a brief general review of a few relevant philosophical debates about human dignity and human rights that are concerned with societal progress in the way karama as a human right, was sometimes interpreted by protesters. Then, the chapter moves on to a closer look at a postcolonial review of similar debates. After reviewing some relevant passages from interviews and other expressions of karama as a human right in Egypt, the chapter ends with an overall analysis of this specific theme in light of the material previously presented.

This chapter summarizes the overall structure of the book and reiterates how it deals with dignity in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution in the context of the Arab Uprisings. Overall, this concluding chapter looks at how the politics of dignity are used to uphold authoritarianism. This has been a blind spot in social and political theories whose authors and practitioners often speak from within a Western cultural framework that often does not understand the relevance of such politics in contexts like Egypt. The need to study karma is timely and the book brought some compelling conclusions for that end particularly regarding understanding dignity as a traumatic experience.