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.

This chapter seeks to understand traditions of nocturnal conviviality, particular those that involved the consumption of alcohol, “from within,” that is, in the terms of those who partook in them. It begins with exploring the language and imagery of night and nocturnal devotion in contemporary poetry, which, as shown later in the chapter, also framed nocturnal sociability and invested it with meaning. Approached through this discourse, the night no longer appears as a mere a dark closet in which to hide while drinking, but rather as the ideal setting for cultivating intimacy and love, carnal, platonic, and divine. In fact, hiding in the night and investing it with spiritual significance were mutually dependent. By enveloping these traditions in darkness, the night allowed a space of “ambivalence and ambiguity” that would not directly challenge the unequivocal dictates of orthodoxy and authority. Social drinking, in short, and the wider cultural streams that legitimized it, found fertile soil in the nocturnal, and flourished in it, much like in a walled night garden.

This chapter focuses on the theme of dignity as materialism. In this chapter, the relationship between materialism and dignity/karama suggested in the interviews and in some of the protesters’ demands during the 2011 uprisings in Egypt is first set in the context of the political and economic project of development in today’s modern and global societies. Then, the chapter provides a review of some of the critiques of this political and economic project of development in modern societies and in structural adjustments exposed in new models for socioeconomic progress, particularly to provide for an alternative to strict materialism. The chapter points to the context of a rise of human rights and human dignity discourses that support nonmaterial dimensions of wellbeing and confront it to the representations of karama related to materialism seen in the study. This rise has been seen not only in different societies but also in designing new development models that are precisely concerned with more egalitarian economic conditions for more social justice.

This chapter is not a thematic one, but a general review of the main findings from the different themes and an analysis of the suggested framing of “dignition,” which is a demand for dignity recognition. The chapter begins by showing the language dimension in articulating political demands to see how protesters may use a form of dignition at a particular time and for particular needs. The chapter presents the suggestion of dignition as one linked to dynamics of revolutionary change and populist demands. Then, the chapter looks at how discussions of identity in the Arab and Egyptian contexts have political drivers particularly in the processes of modernizing Arab states after the colonial period. This leads to emotional discussions of articulating the demand of dignity which reveals issues of identity for protesters. Lastly, the chapter exposes the dynamics of modernity and development in the context of accelerated globalization, which increase the precarity of dignity perceptions.

While the night posed a challenge to authority of the sultan, it was also opportunity to showcase the power of the ruler. By illuminating mosques, Sufi lodges and palaces; in public and private light spectacles, and through court-produced texts, Ottoman sultans in the eighteenth century sought to associate themselves with light and through this association, to project their power and legitimate it in the eyes of their subjects and rivals. The two mediums, words and light, were intentionally and intricately connected to serve this purpose. While Ottoman use of actual and figurative light to project royal power and legitimacy had a long history, the palace elite of the early eighteenth century, and in particular the ruling clique of the so-called Tulip Era (narrowly defined 1718–1730), took it to a whole new level.

It would seem that with the reopening of the taverns in 1827, everything was back to normal. The night in the capital assumed its old, familiar form, allowing what the day forbade. But, with the eradication of the janissaries and the final marginalization of the Bektaşis, the forces that had pushed back against the incursion of sultanic authority into the night and kept it as a space of ambivalence and ambiguity, but also of much violence and insecurity, were finally gone. The night would now be gradually colonized by an increasingly centralizing government promoting more orthodox Islam.1

This chapter focuses on the theme of dignity as faith. First, the chapter attempts to clarify the use of the term “faith” as opposed to “religion.” The notion of dignity/karama is not just related to Islam, but also to a social condition that is embedded in one’s religious status and the accompanying process of socialization. The discussion of a human’s worth, central to understanding dignity/karama, is often related to religious studies. Given the broad context of this relationship, the focus here is to look only at the scholarship suggested from the interviews: notably dignity for Spinoza, for Pico della Mirandola, and for the secularists versus Islamists and in their debate with each other. The chapter gives milestones for the understanding of the discussion of karama and faith/religion in the interviews presented in this chapter.