The above poem was written by Mehmet Akif, a prominent public figure and one of the editors of Sırat-ı Müstakim,Footnote 2 considered to be the flagship of pan-Islamist journals during the final decades of the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 3 Mehmet Akif penned “Vaiz Kürsüde” (The preacher in the pulpit) sometime in 1914 – a fateful year for the Ottomans and the world. A century of internal crises, an arrested economy, incessant reforms, rebellions, separatist movements, weakening sovereignty, and shrinking borders were followed by an intensive series of wars and international crises: the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s annexation of Bosnia Herzegovina and the Italian occupation of Libya and the Aegean Islands are only a few of the events that all happened in a span of a few years. Then, in 1914, the Ottoman Empire was at the cusp of a global war of unforeseen scale, intensity, and bloodshed.
The urgency in this poem is almost tangible. Its provocative and accusative tone is a characteristic feature of the poetry of Mehmet Akif, who, years later, would go on to write the fiery national anthem of the Republic of Turkey. Here, channeled through the persona of an orator-imam at the pulpit of a mosque, preaching the “real Islam” to an audience of Muslims, the poet reprimands them for distorting Islam’s command to work. Invoking the term tevekkül (Ar. tawakkul) nineteen times and sa’y (work, effort) more than thirty, the poem can be seen as an extended effort to redefine such Islamic concepts. In the Islamic tradition, tevekkül is formulated as reliance on God or placing one’s trust in God’s hands.Footnote 4 However, according to Mehmet Akif, it was distorted through centuries to mean resignation from worldly affairs. The distorted meaning of tevekkül, to Mehmet Akif, became a symbol of everything that was corrupt and stagnant in Ottoman culture. In real Islam, believed Mehmet Akif, tevekkül was inseparable from steadfastness and hard work – it was the act of trusting God that hard work always delivers.Footnote 5 In the golden times of Islam, he argued, this very concept was the driving force behind the success of Muslim conquerors, who expanded Islam’s rule “to the Pyrenees.”Footnote 6 But in time, he believed, the concept was transformed into an overarching excuse for unwavering laziness, passivity, and social lassitude. The sad transformation of tevekkül exemplified, Mehmet Akif believed, how people disregarded the Islamic command to work and misconstrued the meaning of religious terms to justify their own unwillingness to work and inability to succeed. Thus, for him, those who misconstrued such concepts damaged Islam, this “luckless religion,” and suffered the consequences of their laziness by living through the reversal of their industrious ancestors’ fortune.
Mehmet Akif’s poem from 1914 was not the first effort to redefine this term, nor was it the first explanation to blame the Ottoman’s loss of power in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on the laziness of its people. The contextual importance of 1914 is defining, but this poem stood on the shoulders of volumes of similar articulations that had been circulating in the Ottoman public realm for more than half a century.Footnote 7 Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, Turkish-writing Muslim-identifying Ottoman moralists engaged in a massive reformulation and reinterpretation of Islamic norms and virtues, which they, like Mehmet Akif, thought were misunderstood and distorted by Muslims through the ages; they attempted to rally Muslims in favor of productivity and eradicate laziness from the personal and social spheres on behalf of the “real” Islam. They accomplished something more than redefining these terms. They Islamicized and popularized a new set terms and notions that previously had little or no religious connotations, and they succeeded in doing this to such an extent that these terms came to be recognized as part of Islamic idiom and practice.
By examining the works of Ottoman moralists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I reveal one of the major articulations of what can be called the moralization of work and the stigmatization of laziness that took place in the last century of the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 8 The twin efforts of Ottoman moralists to reformulate existing concepts and articulate new ones brought a new moral language into existence, one that not only moralized productivity but also made it an integral part of individual, social, and national progress, without which the survival of the empire was seen as impossible. For these moralists, productivity was not an instrument of progress. Productivity was progress.Footnote 9
As the empire faced more wars, rebellions, separatist movements, and economic subjugation in the nineteenth century, the dosage of morally prescribed solutions increased in the public sphere.Footnote 10 In fact, as Benjamin Fortna states, for nineteenth-century Ottoman society, issues regarding morality became “a burning issue of the day.”Footnote 11 Indeed, even a quick look at the popular press of the time would reveal the plethora of judgments expressed regarding Ottoman morality – mostly about its weak and degenerating condition, followed by prescriptions for its rectification. The sheer number of morality books produced in this period is sufficient to demonstrate the booming interest. The number of morality texts published in the last century of the Ottoman Empire far surpassed the number published in the previous four centuries: only in Turkish, more than one hundred books on morality were published in the last decades of the nineteenth century alone.Footnote 12
The quantitative change in the number of morality books paled next to the qualitative changes that accompanied them. Nineteenth-century Ottoman moralists articulated, on a normative level, many emergent discourses and anxieties of the Ottoman reform period. Morality gained a new political charge, one that was congruent with new concepts that were circulating in the empire. For these late Ottoman moralists, all members of society were responsible for saving not only themselves but also their empire. Their emphasis on work made productivity a central issue not only for the moral development of the individual but also for the advancement of the nation in general. They sought to predicate the nation’s success on the actions and moral conditions of its citizens. Although each author’s primary audience differed, many addressed and imagined the Ottoman nation as a single entity while simultaneously drawing the contours of an ideal individual and ideal nation and identifying those who did not fit in as morally weak, lazy, and unresponsive to the call of duty. Many assigned the blame of laziness on the people as a whole – and proposed to cure it by inviting their readers to become active, economically, and socially conscious citizens. The readers of these texts often found themselves characterized as degenerate and flawed, and always in need of reform. In addressing laziness, their texts forcefully contributed to the development of an exclusionist language, at the most abstract level, by labeling those perceived to be non-productive elements (persons as well as institutions) as lazy and idle, and therefore, as impediments to progress.Footnote 13
In this chapter, I diachronically analyze the transforming notions of productivity and laziness in the works of modern and, at times, modernist Ottoman moralists who published in Turkish, using the Ottoman alphabet, in the late nineteenth century up to the Young Turk Revolution in 1908. My analysis of their normative discourses of work draws attention to, first, how these Muslim-identifying and Turkish-writing Ottoman moralists articulated a novel kind of moral knowledge that voiced the contours of a moral subjectivity in relation to the role of the modern citizen; and second, within the limitations of this normative genre, how they moralized, nationalized, and Islamized productivity while branding laziness as a sin, a disease, a crime, and even a form of treason.
While doing so, these late Ottoman moralists reconstructed a particular field of knowledge. As we observed in Mehmet Akif, some did this by dissociating Islam from a certain set of practices that they declared not authentically Islamic and by redefining others as Islamic. They believed that Islam ought to be the moral and authentic basis of change and renewal, but, perhaps similar to their contemporary moralists elsewhere, it was not the Islam “as presently understood and as presently practiced.”Footnote 14 They often wrestled with what they claimed to be distorted religious formulations that advocated a life based on passivity, contentment, and resignation, which they deemed as thoroughly un-Islamic, and saw a renewed approach to Islam – the true one – as the panacea. In doing this, they articulated a new body of knowledge specific to their experience of the empire’s dire realities.
Starting with the premise that Islam can neither be seen as a historical agent, nor a cause, this chapter focuses on the discursive spaces articulated by moralists that made different kinds of both Islamic and modern knowledge and action possible.Footnote 15 These authors’ articulation of religion represented a dual discursive competence – one essentialist and one processual.Footnote 16 That is, while these culture producers referred to religion as a separate, abstract, and fixed category, at the same time, they were “aware of remaking, re-shaping, and reforming” it.Footnote 17 When examining these works that reconstruct Islamic knowledge, we should avoid assuming that there is a “real” and “fixed” sense of tradition and a less authentic interpretation of it.Footnote 18 By examining the period’s morality books and presenting them as cultural factors, I rethink the construction of Islamic knowledge in modern times by focusing on Ottoman moralists and avoid the approaches that define the period’s products merely as either part of “tradition” or of Westernization.
1.1 The Social Practice of Morality Writing
In the nineteenth century, the Ottomans gave a second life to the old genre of morality books. Transforming this genre, both in form and content, was one way in which the new approach to productivity was established at a discursive level. In fact, the moralization of work cannot be understood without examining this particular genre’s larger transformation. Morality books comprise one of the major sources by which we can trace the transformation of morality in the nineteenth century, in connection with the moralization of work and stigmatization of laziness, which this study views as central to the development of the culture of productivity. Around the mid-nineteenth century, morality texts increasingly started to display, at various levels, unparalleled departures from earlier texts in three intertwined ways, all of which contributed to the construction of the moralization of work.
1.1.1 Authorship and Audience
One of the changes observed in the morality genre concerns the patterns of authorship and the social practice of writing morality texts. Whereas before the nineteenth century, most of these texts were penned by members of the ulema and Sufi luminaries, in the nineteenth century, most morality books were written by civil bureaucrats of both high and low ranks, middle school instructors, doctors, and members of the military. As explored in the following section, Ottoman moralists of the early modern era occupied high jurist positions and were scholars of Islamic sciences. Unlike the trendsetter pre-Ottoman moralists, such as Ibn Misqawayh (d. 1030), al-Ghazali (d. 1111), Nasir al-Din Tusi (d. 1274), as well as the prominent Ottoman moralists, such as Kınalızade Ali (d. 1572), and Mehmed Birgivi (d. 1573), writing a book on morals in the nineteenth century no longer required expertise on Islamic sciences and/or ethics.
The moralists of the late nineteenth century should be understood in the larger context of the Ottoman reform period, of which they were both subjects and engines. Their writing on morality was an act of reform and a call for renewal, both to individuals and to society as a political unit. At the center of their conceptualizations of reform stood the importance of productivity. Many administrative and bureaucratic reforms starting in the late eighteenth century and advancing in the nineteenth century reflect this widely shared understanding. The writers of these books, like other urban culture producers, were “subject to and cognizant of the same pressures as the state planners.”Footnote 19
As explored in this chapter and the next, most of the morality authors who wrote on the value of productivity and deemed laziness the gravest sin against the nation were educated in Ottoman institutions, which were either first established or reformed in the nineteenth century. Some even served as educators in these institutions. Many others were employed in Ottoman bureaucratic structures, following their training in Ottoman schools. The valuation of work was crystallized and sustained, on a daily basis, in these state institutions. One of the major arguments of this chapter and the next is that late Ottoman moralists, mostly as members of the Ottoman bureaucratic system and/or educational institutions, were imbued with the modern discourses of productivity not through (merely) reading Western books and/or visiting Western cities, but by taking part in the Ottoman reform processes and institutions. While I explore the relationship between bureaucratic reforms and the development and spread of a culture of productivity in detail in the next chapter, in the next few paragraphs, I focus on how morality books became so widespread in the nineteenth century.
Two factors contributed to the expansion of both authorship and readership of morality books. First, morality became part of the Ottoman school curriculum in the nineteenth century.Footnote 20 The Ottoman state initiated a reform period in education, starting in the late eighteenth century, when new schools, both military and civilian, were established with a set curricular system.Footnote 21 The integration of morality books into the new school curriculum in the Tanzimat era was a drastic change in the expansion of the authorship and audience of this genre. Prior to the nineteenth century, while several morality texts were highly popular, as we can observe from the abundance of the manuscripts found in libraries of urban sites, morality as a subject was not part of the medrese curriculum.
Attribution of increased importance to moral education was not unique to the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century; it was observed in various parts of the world, including France, China, and Japan.Footnote 22 As nation-state structures and new politico-economic ideas and ideologies were consolidated in the nineteenth century, the emphasis on morality evolved from morality to morality education –systematic, thematically homogenized, and complementing the concepts of nationhood. Emile Durkheim, for example, gave a series of lectures on moral education in 1898–9. One of his main concerns was about the integration of moral teachings into modern education.Footnote 23 Durkheim argued that the sources and objects of morality must be a supra-individual entity. For Durkheim, this entity was society itself, since “the domain of the moral begins where the domain of the social begins.”Footnote 24 According to him, although there are various social groups to which an individual belongs, there is a hierarchy. He concluded that because “the family is subordinate to the nation, and humanity has as of yet not organized itself into any one coherent group, the nation has priority in terms of being the ultimate authority and source of morality.”Footnote 25 With its unproblematized attribution of cohesion to the concept of society – and acceptance of nations as natural political units – Durkheim subscribed to the ideology of nationalism and articulated a concept of morality in accordance with it. Whether or not Ottoman moralists attended the Durkheim lectures is unknown to us, but what we know is that, surrounded by similar realities and concerns, at roughly the same time, Ottoman authors addressed a similar set of problems in this novel field of morality in the age of nation-states.
The particular urgency of generating loyalty and cohesion among the peoples of the empire intertwined the ideological goals of Ottomanism with educational reforms. Pedagogical forms embody discursive practices and serve to impose and maintain them.Footnote 26 Pedagogical discourses and practices, therefore, present one of the most prolific channels of Ottomanism. While what it meant to be Ottoman remained a fluid concept until the dismemberment of the empire and the content and methods of education differed among the reformists of all ranks, the belief that education as vital to the Ottoman Empire’s survival remained a constant. Tanzimat era reformists, for example, believed that education not only helped the progress of the empire but also had the power to bring seemingly disparate imperial communities together.Footnote 27 This is how Âli Pasha (1815–71), one of the leading figures of the Tanzimat reforms, summarized the fear of disintegration and its solution:
Ethnic and interest-driven discord among various subjects will end up in disintegration. The state should work on bringing these differences together by education – this is doable. People seek prosperity and security, and the homeland is where these needs are met.Footnote 28
This goal was a major impetus behind nineteenth-century educational reforms, such as the Educational Reform Bill of 1869 (the Nizamname of 1869). This bill reemphasized the importance of morality education in grade schools and introduced mandatory attendance.Footnote 29
In this context, the first morality book purposed for students attending grade schools (sıbyan mektepleri) was written by a leading Tanzimat figure, Sadık Rıfat Pasha (1807–1857).Footnote 30 Published first in 1847, when the Pasha was the head of the Sublime Council for Judicial Ordinances [Meclis-i Vala-yi Ahkam-ı Adliye]), the morality book Risale-i Ahlak is an early example of the incorporation of morality into the new system of education.Footnote 31 Sadık Rıfat Pasha, a key early Tanzimat figure, was considered to be an influence on Mustafa Reşit Pasha, one of the authors of the Gülhane Decree of 1839.Footnote 32
The year Sadık Rıfat Pasha’s book was published, morality education became part of the curriculum of sibyan schools. His Risale-i Ahlak was accepted by the Council of Public Education (Meclis-i Maarif-i Umumiye) as a textbook for both Qur’anic schools as well as state primary schools, and between 1847 and 1876, it served as required reading for students who completed the alphabet primer (Elifba cüzü).Footnote 33 The Pasha designed the book both as a reading exercise in simple Ottoman Turkish and as a basic introduction to moral education. Written in a paternalistic tone and containing references to early modern moralists such as Kınalızade, the book was the first morality book written for mass consumption, targeting a captive audience. It was widely distributed to the Balkan and Anatolian provincial schools during the 1850s and 1860s. Petitions from various parts of the empire were sent to the capital requesting alphabet primers along with similar morality books for small-town schools.Footnote 34
The connection between reforms in education and morality book production strengthened as the decades advanced in the nineteenth century. Motivations for writing morality books varied, but the integration of morality education into the Ottoman educational system played an important role in encouraging the authors of these texts. By the end of the century, many Ottoman writers were motivated by the desire to write a book that would be added to curricula and taught in schools. While Sadık Rıfat was a high-ranking bureaucrat, similar to his pre-nineteenth-century predecessors, many who followed him were not. In his Behcet’ul Ahlak (published in 1896), Abdullah Behcet (1844/5–1911), a middling bureaucrat from the finance ministry, stated the motive behind penning his text.Footnote 35 He wanted it to be chosen as a textbook for the Mülkiye Idadisi (civil high school), which prepared students for the Mekteb-i Mülkiye (civil service academy), after he read in a newspaper that the Maarif Nezareti (ministry of education) was looking for a morality textbook to be added to the academy’s curriculum.Footnote 36 In 1895, then a young and obscure exile to Aleppo, Ali Kemal (1867–1922), the future polemicist and politician, too, responded to the ministry’s call that year.Footnote 37 Ali Seydi, a bureaucrat, a teacher, and a graduate of the Mekteb-i Mülkiye, similarly responded to the same ministry’s call for a morality book to be used as a textbook.Footnote 38 These books attest to the intertwined relationship between the formation of the modern bureaucratic state and individuals who integrated their knowledge production to its expanding institutions and sought to shape them with their voices.
The second factor contributing to the expansion of authorship and readership of morality books was the availability of a cheap press in the nineteenth century.Footnote 39 In this period, printing technologies were relatively more accessible – to a level that opened up publishing to less experienced authors. This allowed many authors to publish their material even if they were not textbooks. Many morality books came in pocket sizes, adding to their versatility. The pocket-sized morality texts certainly were meant to be integrated into daily life rather than being studied with a dictionary. Their authors made conscious choices to go with their books’ physical dimension: these books were almost always directed at ordinary people and not at a scholarly audience. They organized and presented the material in an easily accessible language, in which they could broadcast their ideals and ideas to an ever-widening reading community.Footnote 40 In his introduction, Abdullah Behcet presented reasons the ministry should choose his book; foremost among these, he stated that it is accessible to a general audience – in his case, he hoped, a captive one.Footnote 41 The classical morality books, he argued, had one major limitation: they were written for experts (erbab-ı ihtisas) and could not be used in youth education. The choice of writing for a general (and young) audience was demonstrated in the books: some of them, especially textbooks, included a lügatçe – a short dictionary of sorts at the bottom of the pages providing definitions of the difficult words that appeared in the text. One major advantage of the moralists of this period was that the genre was not a new and/or foreign one – its early incarnations had been read and heard by the public for centuries. This familiarity of the concept of ahlak books should be recognized as we try to understand how the public accepted this old genre in its new incarnation. We do not know how widespread the readership of these books was in the nineteenth century, but the fact that some of these books were used as textbooks in secondary schools throughout the empire points to their widespread dissemination.
The authorship and readership of morality texts were not limited to the Muslim community of the Ottoman Empire. Yehezkel Gabbay (1825–98), an Ottoman journalist, translated (in the loosest sense of the term) Sadık Rıfat Pasha’s (1807–56) Risale-i Ahlak, into Ladino, a Sephardic language primarily spoken by the Sephardic Jews of the Ottoman Empire. Gabbay was well aware of the novelty of the Pasha’s book, as he argued that its style should replace the older and, according to him, obscure Judaic morality books.Footnote 42 This book, titled El Buen Dotrino, was a nineteenth-century reformulation of a long tradition of Jewish ethics books, sifrut musar.Footnote 43 Similar to its model book, El Buen Dotrino became a textbook in the primary education of the Ladino-speaking community. Hence, shifts in discourses of morality were not limited to one community of the empire: they crossed communal lines.Footnote 44
1.1.2 Morally Upright, Hardworking Citizens
The changes in assumptions about morality account for the second major novelty in the genre of morality books. There are two intertwined aspects of these assumptions: one amounts to what can be called as the politicization of subjective interiority, and the other is the assumption that both individuals and society urgently needed reform and rectification.
Morality books of the mid-to-late nineteenth century addressed a moral community that overlapped with a political community – a community that was imagined to have clear territorial boundaries, a flag, an imperial identity, and a shared role and responsibility in the empire’s future. Morality was integral to the new discourses of subjectivity that flourished during the Ottoman reform period. A major underlying assumption in many of the morality texts is that one’s value as a person is directly proportional to their value to their nation, displayed through acts of hard work and readiness for duty. Moralists addressed their readers not only as morally accountable individuals but also as members of a nation, as responsible citizens of the Ottoman Empire. For example, in the case of nineteenth-century Persia, “the perfect man had changed from a Muslim believer to an Iranian citizen.”Footnote 45 The virtuous Muslim, as Talal Asad points out, was never perceived as an autonomous individual, but as a person inhabiting a “moral space shared by all who are together bound to God.”Footnote 46 Morality texts of the nineteenth century and later did address a moral community, like their predecessors, but more often than not, this moral community was a national community.
For Ottoman morality discourses, a one-dimensional transition from a perspective centered on religious identity to a national one seems simplistic, however. As it will be explored in the following section, we have to take into account that early-modern Ottoman moralists too addressed an Ottoman-ruled audience as opposed to all Muslims of the world. They, too, addressed mostly urban, Ottoman-specific problems and produced arguments for the legitimacy of the Ottoman dynasty. The nineteenth-century books referenced Islamic norms profusely, similar to their counterparts in the early modern era. Respectively, in the nineteenth century, a Muslim identity was incorporated into the concept of Ottoman moral citizenship. All of these complicate the presumed linear passage from religious to national.
Morality books in the nineteenth century attest to a new set of assumptions about the self. Self-regulation had long been one of the most recognized religious and moral practices, but in this particular period, the construction of a new subjective interiority reflect the centrality of a reformed self in the overall reform project of the empire, establishing a direct connection between the development of character and unfolding of the future of the empire.Footnote 47 Because of this assumed connection, the individual infirmities and immoralities are now seen as social diseases in need of rectification. Productivity is not only a means to achieve this rectification, but also its goal.
In this context, duty became the central concept in the organization of morality books in the nineteenth-century Ottoman morality texts – a common characteristic of morality (and self-help) books in the modern period both in Europe and the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 48 Self-improvement through being productive, therefore, became a personal, religious, social, and political duty. As I discuss in the following sections, Ottoman morality books not only transformed traditional elements of the Ottoman morality genre, but also created a new language for the self-help genre. Hence, they are a product of a distinctly nineteenth-century Ottoman literary practice.Footnote 49
1.1.3 Virtue Ethics to Deontological Ethics
Thus far, I have indicated that the concept of duty gained new importance in the morality texts of the nineteenth century. Without this concept, the idea and ideal of work, beyond hand to mouth, could not be promoted. The third distinctive characteristic that we see in many of late Ottoman morality texts is the organization of the genre around the concept of duty. In the nineteenth century, there is a general shift from virtue ethics (or golden mean ethics) to deontological ethics.Footnote 50 As the next sections explore, until the mid-nineteenth century, morality books usually employed the perspective of Aristotelian virtue ethics, organizing the books mainly around the concepts of virtues and vices. In virtue ethics, the subject seeks a golden mean between two extremes in order to attain good morals. Although the golden mean model continued to be used sporadically, many late nineteenth-century authors structured their morality texts on categories of duty (taksim-i vezayif): duties to self, duties to society, and duties to the nation. If there was a new grammar for selfhood and nationhood, it was best expressed within this deontological approach to morality.
There are indicators that the advice literature in the eighteenth century reflected a new emphasis on the usage of the term duty. In this period, the concept known as “circle of justice,” or “circle of equity,”Footnote 51 once a central tenet of Ottoman advice treatises, slowly disappeared.Footnote 52 In its stead, political advice treatises emphasized the concept of “duty to religion and state” (din u devlet). Early modern conceptualizations of duty were limited in scope, and those who were burdened with the duty to the din u devlet were usually not the common folk. Still, we can imagine that, in the nineteenth century, those who called for a mobilization for productivity by using the concept of duty benefited from an already existing language. The deontological rhetoric was bidirectional. Saffet Pasha (1814–83), who is known for crafting the nizamname of 1869, which introduced expansive reforms in education, said that the “education of the public [is] the duty of any state and government.”Footnote 53 It was the duty of the state to educate the people about their social duties (vezaif-i cemiyyet). This concept, therefore, lay at the core of the languages of reform, be it for state institutions or rebuilding of the self and society.
Ottoman moralists embraced the concept of duty, as the idea of the transformation of each and every member of the imperial peoples gained traction. As Ali Kemal stated, “duty is the soul of the science of morality. Morality is the science of duties.”Footnote 54 According to Abdurrahman Şeref (1853–1925), a moralist and a prominent figure in the Ottoman intellectual realm, individuals have a duty to serve not only their families and villages/neighborhoods but also the state. For him, duties to each of these had equal weight.Footnote 55 Duty, as a self-reflective notion, circles around to other levels of society and eventually reaches the level of humanity. As part of a person’s duties to self (vazife-i zatiyye) and social duties (vazife-i içtimaiyye), morality books discussed productivity in a normative language, making it not only an individual path to fulfillment but also a social duty that an individual owed to the state.
These changes in the genre demonstrate that the new approach to morality and new conceptualizations of productivity are historically intertwined. The moral infirmities and weaknesses of the individual no longer belonged just to the individual. Therefore, the laziness of a political subject was not merely a social and political problem. The language of this new subjectivity was constitutive of the language of citizenship, and both were closely tied to the empire’s success or failure.
Before exploring the work of the Ottoman moralists and their articulations of the value of work and denunciation of laziness, I briefly turn to the articulations of laziness in the Ottoman world prior to the nineteenth century.
1.2 Before the Nineteenth Century
Prior to the nineteenth century, the notions of work and laziness had cultural meanings that generally differed from those that they acquired during and after it.Footnote 56 There is no trans-historical concept of laziness and industriousness. Like any other concept, they are dynamic and historically specific. Despite the apolitical facade of the texts they usually appeared in, these concepts are not devoid of political meanings. In what follows, I provide a sketch of meanings attributed to work and laziness and briefly touch upon the historical contexts in which these meanings are articulated, ranging from concerns of sultanic legitimation and orthodoxy to the tensions between authorities and various social groups, including coffeehouse patrons, vagrants, and the urban unemployed.Footnote 57 My goal in this preliminary sketch is to show that attitudes toward work and laziness as articulated in the moralistic, political, and poetic traditions were not dominated by a single discourse, nor they had fixed meanings within their respective traditions.
Early modern Ottoman moralists and jurists discussed laziness and work, similar to their medieval colleagues, with frequent references to a template based on the golden mean (i’tidal) in virtue ethics.Footnote 58 Starting with the eighth and ninth centuries, a number of currents shaped what is known as the “Islamic” ethics tradition, from Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic influences to Persian statecraft literature, and, later, the political and intellectual formulations of early modern Ottoman statecraft.Footnote 59 Virtue ethics was an Aristotelian method, and it was appropriated by early Muslim moralists to become the main approach until the deontological (duty-centered) paradigm came to dominate the field of ethics in the nineteenth century.
Anchored to the views of virtue and the ethical practice of faith, the early modern Ottoman moralists and jurists aimed to assist the perfection of character, assuming an audience of Muslim males, mainly elite.Footnote 60 It was within this mixed tradition with a heavy reference to virtue ethics, responding to the particular concerns of their politico-moral worlds, the eminent early modern learned men of the empire, such as Kınalızade Ali (1510–72), Mehmed Birgivi (also known as Muhammad Pir Ali, d. 1573), and Ibn Kemal (also known as Kemalpaşazade, 1468–1534) discussed laziness.Footnote 61 Their work, especially the morality books of Kınalızade Ali and Mehmed Birgivi, with many commentaries written on them, remained popular and influential for centuries.Footnote 62
In virtue ethics, laziness was presented as a vice, and the language against it was just one facet of the broader discourse against all vices. The virtue ethics paradigm viewed human morality as a constant balance of excesses and deficiencies. Laziness, in this paradigm, was presented as a deficiency of desire (tefrid-i şehvet), which needed to be rectified. Desire (şehvet) was seen as the basic function of self. Not desire itself, but the lack or excess of desire was presented as a problem. The scholar and moralist Birgivi and his eighteenth-century commentator Kadızade Ahmed discussed laziness in the nexus of extremes and deficiencies of desire. Having excessive desires pushed one toward transgression (fücur), while its lack caused many other vices, such as laziness (betalet).Footnote 63 Laziness was seen as a hindrance to the acts of worship a believer was required to fulfill. In other words, while the excess (ifraad) of desire was shown to be a transgression of the boundaries of rightful behavior, its deficiency, that is, the other extreme (tafreed), was indicated as an inability to do anything, ranging from religious obligatory rites to deeds permitted by religion, such as working for one’s livelihood (kasb, kesb).Footnote 64 In line with the golden mean approach, moderation of desire (i.e., iffet) was a virtue one had to strive to achieve, since “with this trait, one desires and engages with activities that are fit for and allowed by the shari’a.”Footnote 65
The concept of kasb/kesb, earning one’s livelihood, gets a detailed treatment in Kınalızade Ali’s seminal work Ahlak-ı Alâi (The Sublime Ethics). Kınalızade Ali was a prominent Ottoman scholar, moralist, and judge, who, through his Ahlak-ı Alâi, contributed to the consolidation of sultanic legitimacy in the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 66 For Kınalızade Ali, laziness was divided into two types: laziness in worldly activities and laziness in religious deeds.Footnote 67 According to Kınalızade, the goal of worldly activities is earning one’s own livelihood, and laziness is a hindrance to this. Being lazy in worldly activities deprives a person of their ability to sustain themselves in this world, making them destitute.
After the opening of the coffeehouses in the Ottoman capital and throughout the empire in the mid-sixteenth century, the social commentary on kasb also involved coffeehouses. The history of the coffeehouses and coffeehouse patrons in Ottoman urban centers and their at times tense and adversarial relationship with the authorities is well known.Footnote 68 When Katib Çelebi (1609–57), a prominent polymath of the seventeenth century, described coffeehouses, he commented on how people “wasted” their time in these sites. Katib Çelebi emphasized how “[s]tory-tellers and musicians diverted the people from their employments,” making their “livelihood f[a]ll into disfavor.”Footnote 69 These arguments against idleness, of course, were one way in which the coffeehouses, disliked by authorities for a wide range of reasons (from being sites of political dissent to causing city fires), were delegitimized. Still, “earning one’s own livelihood” (kasb) played a major role in the arguments and policies against coffeehouses and their patrons.
These attitudes, including Birgivi’s and Kınalızade Ali’s, reflect the earlier debates on the jurisprudence of earning a living, a bone of contention between different schools of thought in Muslim societies since early Islamic times.Footnote 70 Michael Bonner’s analysis of a ninth-century book attributed to al-Shaybani (d. 805) shows that earning a living was usually formulated not as duty but as a right.Footnote 71 In his commentary on al-Shaybani’s book, al-Sarakhsi (d. 1096), a medieval jurist, argued that kasb is not a duty/obligation (farida) in and of itself.Footnote 72 His reasoning was simple: if it were a religious duty, then doing as much of it as possible (al-istikthar fihi) would be recommended, whereas excessive work, when the goal was merely material gain, was condemned. The reason work was not a duty (farida) but a right was explained in terms of the redistribution of wealth: unless one worked and earned wealth, he/she could not perform other religious obligations.Footnote 73 Later in this chapter, I will turn to the issue of duty and how this notion gained a prominent place in the writings of the moralists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in parallel with the valuation of work.
While Kınalızade Ali viewed the goal of work as earning one’s own living and deemed laziness that affected one’s livelihood as a vice, he considered laziness in religious matters to be a more deeply concerning problem. Indeed, although these two forms of laziness bore similarities, he viewed them as fundamentally different. In the moral world of Kınalızade, laziness in religious matters, one of the worst vices, is an abhorrent trait that costs a believer his/her eternal happiness. Kınalızade quotes a Persian poem in Ahlak-ı Alâi, which sets the tone of the urgency of doing godly deeds, pointing out that after one dies, there would be no opportunity to achieve good deeds and no obligations to fulfill:
Compared to being deprived of a good life in the hereafter, laziness in worldly matters was presented as rather inconsequential. In Kınalızade’s view, worldly laziness does not necessarily correspond to the overall laziness of character that affected one’s faith and good deeds (amel-i salih). One could be a hardworking person in worship and rituals while not being a major achiever of worldly gains. Even further, Kınalızade states that being too involved or invested in worldly work can cause laziness in religious matters because any work that keeps one from his/her religious duties is an abuse of the limited time one has in this temporary world.Footnote 75
One of the operating concerns of Kınalızade’s Ahlak-ı Alâi was about the protection of social cohesion and the dangers of the common folk’s entry to the ranks of the ruling elite.Footnote 76 A common conviction among the early modern treatise writers, Kınalızade’s views on the permeability of social classes as a cause for instability might be important in understanding his measured stance on worldly work and the accumulation of wealth, which was a major pathway for many who had gained the privileges of the ruling class in the early modern period. Given his concerns about the common folk’s unchecked demands on the imperial structures, Kınalızade’s emphasis on the dangers of worldly work is not surprising.Footnote 77
While early modern Ottomans borrowed from their medieval counterparts, it can be clearly seen that their particular concerns and discussions reflect the specific and novel problems they faced. Both Kınalızade and Birgivi’s articulation of what was considered acceptable contributed greatly to the Ottoman formulations of orthodoxy and Ottoman ruling elites’ concerns in the sixteenth century.
Both Kınalızade’s and Birgivi’s discussions on laziness and work were brief, an indication that these issues were not regarded as central for them and for their audiences. This is definitely not true for Ibn Kemal’s treatise titled Risale fi medhi’s-sa’y ve’z zemm alel bitale (Treatise on Praising Work and Condemning Laziness). This treatise is one of the rare works that addressed the issue of laziness as its main theme. Both Kınalızade and Birgivi regarded Ibn Kemal as an influential figure in their intellectual developments.Footnote 78 In this treatise, Ibn Kemal evaluated the importance of working for one’s own livelihood through the prism of Ottoman orthodoxy.Footnote 79 Starting his work with the Qur’anic verse, “that man will only have what he has worked toward” (53:39), Ibn Kemal’s treatise is a diatribe against laziness and begging.Footnote 80 For him, begging is a result of laziness. Basing his arguments on this verse and the concept of kasb, he condemns begging in unequivocal terms and adamantly argues that one should earn his own living.
Ibn Kemal’s work attests to the fact that at particular historical moments, some (perhaps dormant) religious discourses against laziness rose to prominence and were employed in an overtly political manner. As in the case with this treatise, Ottoman Sunni imperial narratives, especially during perceived times of crises, appropriated medieval arguments, such as against begging, to target oppositional political movements. This particular historical moment occurred during the era of heightened clashes between the Ottoman and Safavid Empires; these clashes took place not only on the battlefields but also in intellectual and commercial arenas. The elites of these two expanding empires engaged in a struggle for legitimacy that engulfed communities perceived to be at the margins of their respective orthodoxies.Footnote 81 Some Sufi orders employed begging as a communal practice and were deemed as a threat to the established order.Footnote 82 Ibn Kemal’s discourse against begging (presented as stemming from laziness) should be read in the context of such a moment of crisis.
Ibn Kemal was a towering figure in his period. After quitting his military career to become a scholar, he rose to the highest offices of the empire and partook in imperial politics. During the reign of Selim II, he served for eight years as the chief jurist (Sheikh al-Islam/Şeyhulislam), the highest ulema post in the empire. He was part of the military campaign against the Safavids and (in)famously legitimized the war against the Safavid Empire on the basis of their heresy.Footnote 83 A staunch critic (and persecutor) of what he perceived as heterodox movements in the empire, he formulated the imperial Sunni ideology against both external enemies (such as the Safavids) and internal communities that the state perceived as natural allies of their enemies.Footnote 84
Ibn Kemal’s treatise on laziness was part of a larger battle he and his patrons were waging against what they considered a politically threatening heterodox movements in the empire. As the work of Ahmet Karamustafa and others show, in the context of the great struggle between the Safavid and Ottoman Empires, antinomian Sufi traditions posed a political threat to the Ottoman ruling elite. Most of the heterodox/antinomian Sufi groups of this time, such as the Kalenderis, practiced communal forms of begging.Footnote 85 Begging, as a means of humility, has long been a practice of some Sufis and ascetics (zahids), not unlike mendicants in medieval and early modern Europe. The act of begging involved many levels of meaning. For Kalenderis, begging was a public act that displayed their opposition to the highly ritualized norms of Sufi and ulema establishments. They denounced the worldly pomp of the ulema and the ceremoniousness of mainstream Sufi orders by ridding themselves of the customary Sufi insignia (for example, cloaks and felt caps) and ridiculing Sufis in public. Kalenderis had high recognizability as well, having shaved their hair, beard, mustache, and eyebrows, a practice called chahar darb (four blows), adding a visual element to the performative aspect of their challenge.Footnote 86 It is not surprising that their begging, sometimes in large groups and accompanied by loud chanting in the streets, was perceived as a subversive act.Footnote 87
Ibn Kemal’s critique of begging, then, was targeting these subversive acts and their actors. He supported his position by basing his arguments on God’s laws, which, as he argued, required that all labor needed to be compensated. The underlying problem of begging is that a beggar receives the fruits of someone else’s labor without any compensation (materially or otherwise).Footnote 88 Here, Ibn Kemal extensively quoted medieval scholars on kasb. He also argued that these beggars pose as Sufis, but, in reality, are not; thus, he denied them any socially accepted status. He opined that these so-called Sufis depended on others for their livelihood and did not deserve the good treatment of decent people. Lest his own social group was misunderstood, he highlighted the contrast between these Sufi groups and the ulema, another social group who did not perform labor, as it is commonly understood, and depended on patrons for their livelihood. For Ibn Kemal, the ulema were distinguished not only for having knowledge but also for sharing it – they gave back to others, unlike the begging Sufis who had neither scholarly pursuits nor any intention to give back to those from whom they took. They did not have the capacity to teach people in return for their alms. Ibn Kemal proceeded with the argument that the act of taking something and not paying it back was against the will of God, and therefore was an injustice (zulm).
Ibn Kemal’s treatise should be understood as the stance of a member of high-ranking ulema in the sixteenth century against the heterodox practices of a particular group of Sufis that were becoming increasingly visible and threatening to the imperial center. Unlike the nineteenth-century moralists, his discussions on laziness did not possess a heightened sense of urgency. Similarly, unlike the nineteenth-century writers, his concern with laziness was not directed at the population at large, nor was it a “national” character problem that needed to be rectified – it was just another front in which he delegitimized the perceived enemies of the Ottoman dynasty. The fact that he wrote his treatise in Arabic is further evidence that his audience was not the general public. In that matter, too, he differed from his counterparts in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
What intensified the discourses against laziness, particularly in the eighteenth century, was the rising concern among statesmen regarding vagrancy in Istanbul and the other urban centers of the Ottoman Empire. These miscreant groups were usually seen as a threat to urban security, and they were periodically rounded up and sent outside of city centers.Footnote 89 Particularly following the two major rebellions that shook the capital city Istanbul in 1703 and 1730, the unemployed youth, associated with the unruly classes, such as Janissaries and street gangs, became the target of the authorities and were gathered from coffeehouses.Footnote 90 As the century advanced, the perceived threat of vagrants and the unemployed increased on the radar of the authorities. As Fariba Zarinabaf notes, while the Ottoman state did not pass vagrancy acts until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it saw vagrants as a threat and referred to them as “idle and disorderly,”Footnote 91 revealing the assumed connection between perceived idleness of persons and their potential criminality.Footnote 92 The discourses against idleness and vagrancy legitimized the suppression of dissent – even if only limited to the urban centers and done in a sporadic fashion rather than in a systematic and sustained manner as we encounter in the nineteenth century and later.
While jurists and moralists attacked laziness for a gamut of reasons (and placing moral limitations on excessive work), Ottoman poetry reflected a different value world.Footnote 93 The poetic tradition presents us with a distinct take on work and laziness. In the literary tradition of divan poetry, which amalgamated tropes from the Persianate and Hellenistic poetic traditions, the concept of work is often mentioned pejoratively. Whereas morality treatises praised worldly work in moderation, Ottoman poets despised it and depicted it as a burden. Cinani (d. 1595), a poet and contemporary of Kınalızade and Birgivi, sheds a different light on work in these verses:
Similar to English, the Turkish word for labor, emek, meant suffering, and torment. In harmony with the association of heaven with idle pleasures and work as the curse of the postlapsarian human experience, Cinani depicts work as a lost struggle against fate. A similar poem connects worldly work with suffering, praises poverty, and advocates a life of contentment:
These poems may reflect the perspective of the poets about the changing conditions of the world around them, witnessing some members of their communities striving – from their viewpoint, perhaps, too hard – to take part in economic activities and power struggles.Footnote 96 The poetic social commentaries perhaps expressed the poets’ frustration and critique of the troubles their contemporaries went through for job security and material gains.
As we now turn to the moralistic writings produced in the late Ottoman period, the above brief discussion illustrates the variation in formulations of work and laziness and how these concepts were embedded in narratives that reflected the various knowledge/power configurations and social realities of their times. More relatedly to the following one, the moralistic narratives explored in this section also show how the values Ottoman elites wrote upon were not replicas of earlier periods, indicating the dynamic nature of what seems to be static and timeless. Therefore, intertwining multiple sources, and/or responding to the immediacy of contemporary matters using established norms were not unique to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Given these characteristics, the genre is valuable to our understanding of how various pressing new currents entered – not just in a merely intellectual sense – it, and how they transformed and were transformed by the genre. The moral values and discursive traditions are embodied in the practices and institutions and “hence deeply imbricated in the material life of those inhabiting them.”Footnote 97 In this respect, we cannot draw a distinction between pre-nineteenth-century morality texts and those that came later and claim that the former was static and devoid of politics or more authentic than its nineteenth-century counterparts. The difference lay elsewhere, as I discuss in the coming sections of this chapter.
1.3 The Transformation of Work and Laziness
1.3.1 Work as a Civilizational Duty: Going Beyond Bare Necessities
In the nineteenth century, the measure of productivity went beyond the bounds of kasb/kesb debates of the early modern period. If in the sixteenth century, Ibn Kemal found begging despicable and impermissible on the basis of one needing to earn their own livelihood, the nineteenth-century reformists went further and condemned working only for the minimum necessary to meet essential needs.
As the nineteenth-century reformists conceived it, productivity was elevated to a civilizational marker, as civilization became an aspirational concept. In 1863, Mehmed Şerif, who wrote on the economy politic, published an article titled “Lüzum-u sa’y u amel” (The necessity of work); in it, he argued that one ought to work to earn more than what is enough since working hard is a civilizational duty – one that the individual owes to their society.Footnote 98 Replete with new terms, such as progress and civilization, Mehmed Şerif’s argument was built on the idea that it was necessary to work hard for one reason, if not any other: it is an individual’s duty to society to maintain a livelihood to enjoy more than the barest essentials. Only by “working and going through the trouble of earning,” can one consume non-essential goods. For Mehmed Şerif, obtaining non-essentials (and having buying power) is not a self-serving act, but helps the “expansion of civilization” and contributes to the “progress of civilization and prosperity.” Therefore, Mehmed Şerif stated, work should be considered a necessary duty to humanity (mukteza-yi vezaif-i insaniyet), because the individual was a member of a society, the members of which must work hard to produce and maintain that society’s level of civilization.Footnote 99
Particularly following the Crimean War (1853–6), during and after which the Ottoman state borrowed heavily from the international debtors, urgent discussions on economic assessment and the salvation of the empire’s economy intensified. The old ideals of self-sustainability were now accompanied by far more aggressive ideas of wealth and profit that were needed to sustain an Ottoman entrepreneurial class, which was seen as necessary for advancing the Ottoman economy. The new economic man was central in this vision: he needed to reform his old ways of conducting business, go beyond the basic necessities, and be aware of new discoveries. As in the writings of Mehmed Şerif, everyone was charged with “increasing the quality of their work, and strive to reform their trade.”Footnote 100 This duty required an overhaul of the methods used by previous generations. Mehmed Şerif argued that, if people did not change “what [they] have seen from their fathers and masters and strive harder to invent [new ways], they will never reach a better position than their predecessors.”Footnote 101 This was not merely a question of working harder. Intellectuals like Mehmed Şerif advocated a new mentality about work, one that, they argued, would enable the Ottomans to achieve civilizational progress.
The same decade Mehmed Şerif penned this piece saw the emergence of the Young Ottomans, a generation of oppositional intellectuals and public figures, educated and trained in the new bureaucratic institutions of the empire. Tired of what they saw as the top–down and half-complete reforms imposed by the Ottoman high bureaucracy, and the international crises in which the Ottoman state frequently found itself, the Young Ottomans voiced their dissatisfaction with the rule of the Tanzimat cadres while formulating their vision of social change based on meaningful reforms and more extensive participation. Leading figures such as Ibrahim Şinasi (1826–71) and Namık Kemal (1840–88) popularized such novel concepts as constitutionalism, nation, liberty, and homeland. Successful in translating their visions and anxieties of reform to popular discourses through various media, they remained influential for the coming generations.Footnote 102
Notions of productivity played a significant role in the reform visions of prominent Young Ottomans. As one of the articulators of discourses of productivity, the concepts of sa’y u gayret (“effort and ardour”) played a crucial role in Namık Kemal’s writings. As a child and critic of the Tanzimat reforms, Namık Kemal was also critical of the Ottoman body politic, which he believed suffered from symptoms of deep-seated laziness:
Everyone is wasting half of their life in inertia and seclusion (atalet ve inziva). How can we reach the [level of] modern nations in the path of progress, [nations] that spend their days and nights for work and order, found ways to educate the mind and protect the health (terbiye-i akl ve hıfz-ı sıhhat), and are flawless in body and behavior; while our body politic … hides at night and spends its life in the condition of a half-unconscious epileptic?Footnote 103
As someone who spent his life criticizing the Ottoman governments and consequently in exile, here, Namık Kemal directs his harshest critiques to the perceived problems of the Ottoman commoners. His concerns regarding the people’s purported inertia are closely tied with his vision of converting the millet-i tabia (a nation of followers, i.e., subjects) to millet-i metbua (a nation to be followed [by its rulers]).Footnote 104 For that end, the individual citizen has the responsibility to progress on every level, entirely based on his/her own effort. He accuses the Ottomans of a particular type of laziness that leads people to expect everything to be done by those in power.Footnote 105 Namık Kemal invites his readers to be conscious of their duties and take their fates in their own hands. From consuming sufficient amounts of nutritious food (basically, for Namık Kemal, meat), keeping one’s home and street clean, to dressing properly in the winter, he presents many major and minor issues as tied to the overall salvation of the empire and its peoples.Footnote 106 In all these, he calls his readers to be proactive and productive, and take responsibility for their own fate and not expect the state to save them.
The importance of productivity in the civic-duty centered reform visions of Namık Kemal is exemplified in his take on the introduction of street lighting (tenvir-i esvak) in Istanbul, as part of the extensive urban reforms that took place starting in the mid-nineteenth century, when the Ottoman economy’s integration into Europe intensified. Historians draw parallels with the contemporaneous urban reforms of Baron Haussmann in Paris.Footnote 107 As T.J. Clark points out for Paris, the city was seen as “the emblem and agent of a wider economic transformation.”Footnote 108 Along the same lines, in an 1871 article titled “Civilization,” Namık Kemal strongly supported the street lighting reform, mainly because an illuminated city would allow the “people of work” (ashab-ı sa’y) to engage in “six or seven hours of extra work and commercial activity, adding one more life to their lives.”Footnote 109 Such a change in the urban realities was welcomed not only because it would turn nights into days, ending the concept of the sunset as the end of the day, but also because it would support the efforts of making the entire city a worksite, and city dwellers industrious and productive.
For Namık Kemal, reaching Europe’s level of civilization required two elements: hard work and time to accumulate the fruits of that hard work. In his well-known essay on progress, he argued that if the work was properly done, there is no doubt that the Ottomans would catch up with the level of progress observed in Europe in two centuries.Footnote 110 Both hard work and time were, for Namık Kemal, obtainable, if not for a misunderstanding of the term kanaat (contentment) that equated it with lazy hedonism.Footnote 111 In an effort to reverse that, Namık Kemal ends his essay with a call to his countrymen to wake up from their hedonistic sleep and be productive, for as the Qur’an says, “that man will only have what he has worked toward” (53:39).Footnote 112 The term kanaat, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter in the example of Mehmet Akif’s poem in 1914, would continue to be a term with which many generations of Ottoman reformists would wrestle.
As enamored as they were with the industriousness of the Europeans, a substantial amount of the Ottoman reformists of the period believed that the culture of productivity needed to be founded on Islamic principles. They were quick in pointing out the native roots of this culture while also referencing its universal nature.Footnote 113 In 1878, Ahmed Midhat (1844–1912), one of the most popular authors of the late Ottoman period, published his Sevda-yı Sa’y u Amel (L’Amour du travail).Footnote 114 Ahmed Midhat’s book not only articulated the vital necessity of developing a great love for industriousness but also offered a unique summary of the history of l’amour du travail in the Ottoman world.Footnote 115 For him, “the love for work” was not an inherently European characteristic. This love was a universal one – it had simply gone dormant in the Ottoman world. Ahmed Midhat believed that “if ‘sevda-yı sa’y u amel’ does not fully flourish in our society, it is because our national progress has not reached the level of maturity, while its occurrence in Europe can be explained by the fact that their people were more educated than we [are].”Footnote 116 If Europeans were able to awaken this love from its dormant state by establishing strong educational practices, so could the Ottomans.
These remarks reveal several issues. First of all, Ahmed Midhat believed that the ideal of industriousness is best exemplified in Europe. Certainly, Ahmed Midhat subscribed to the progressive view of history and painted a homogenized view of Europe. He also believed that the Ottoman people had lagged in this historical development – not sharing the same temporal plane with Europe, as Namık Kemal believed.Footnote 117 However, Ahmed Midhat, like Namık Kemal, held that the Ottomans – like any other nation – were in the process of catching up. Just as sufficient levels of education had awakened the dormant industrious character among the Europeans, so education was expected to produce the same result in the Ottoman Empire.
In Ahmed Midhat’s narrative, the universal value of industriousness was not only de-Europeanized in its essence, but also it was presented as an Islamic duty.Footnote 118 Ahmed Midhat believed that if Ottomans took Islam’s orders to heart, they would awaken their love for industriousness. Islamic notions “are given to us [by God] to bring out this sublime love from its potentiality.”Footnote 119 To do that, he proposed that all the Qur’anic verses, sayings of the Prophet, and the sayings of influential scholars (kelam-ı kibar) that praised hard work should be displayed in public in “golden letters, in beautiful calligraphy.” These sayings should be inscribed on buildings, as part of the Ottoman architectural tradition. Nonetheless, he admitted, for these to have an effect, the meanings of these maxims needed to be “engrave[d] on our hearts.”
Others must have shared Ahmed Midhat’s wishes, given how they were, in part, fulfilled. The saying “al-kāsibu habibullah” (he who earns is God’s beloved), attributed to Prophet Muhammad, became a widespread inscription on new or renovated buildings of the nineteenth century, advancing a world view in which “earning” is propagated not only through books and treatises, but also through public structures frequented by people. One of the most notable examples of these structures is the Ottoman Bank headquarters in Bankalar Caddesi (inaugurated in 1892), the old banking district of Istanbul.Footnote 120 A beautiful inscription of “al-kāsibu habibullah,” crafted by the famous calligrapher Sami Effendi (1837–1912),Footnote 121 decorates the interior gate of this institution that, contrary to its name, was mostly owned and operated by foreign powers, to which the Ottoman state was indebted, highlighting the colonial context of the struggle of productivity.Footnote 122 Another inscription of the saying by the same calligrapher can be seen on the Fesçiler entrance of the Grand Bazaar in historic Istanbul. This inscription, like the one in the Ottoman Bank, is of recent making. It was placed on the gate during the renovation that took place following the 1894 earthquake.
The word el-kāsib is an ambiguous term with a spectrum of meanings. It literally means the one who earns, yet its translation usually contains a reference to the concept of kesb/kasb, rendering its translation as “he who earns his living is God’s beloved.”Footnote 123 It can also be translated as “the one who earns God’s approval (rıza),” deemphasizing its material meaning and emphasizing its spiritual aspects. But Edhem Eldem, in his history of the Ottoman Bank, translates it rather boldly as “he who earns money,” rendering the translations of the saying as “he who earns money is God’s beloved.”Footnote 124 Eldem’s translation reflects a narrowed meaning, with an emphasis on the monetary (not merely material) connotation of the word “earning” to the disadvantage of its spectrum of other meanings. It may perfectly be the view of those who placed these inscriptions on structures (and desired that they gain high visibility in the public sphere, as Ahmed Midhat did) that the term’s material and even monetary meanings are not exclusive of the meaning that referenced the earning of God’s approval.
Perhaps, the larger question was how would the meaning of these inscriptions be inscribed in the hearts of people? In the next section, I explore how Ottoman moralists of the late nineteenth century engaged in a concerted effort to moralize, nationalize, and Islamize productivity.
1.4 Moralization, Nationalization, and the Islamization of Productivity
By conceptualizing a new subjectivity and attributing a central role to social duties (vazife-i ictimaiyye), moralists were able to construct work and industriousness in a moralizing language. They presented productivity not only as an individual path to happiness and fulfillment but also as a social duty that would elevate the level of the civilization and progress of the empire. Work was a central aspect of building a new individual and a new society. The belief in work was presented as rectifying all infirmities, creating social cohesion, and building the basis of shared aspirations.
In the morality books of the late nineteenth century, work was a very modern calling: it was given a central role at the individual level and at the civilizational level. For individuals, work had to be done conscientiously, in a disciplined way, and not merely as a means of subsistence but as an end in itself. Individual happiness and existential fulfillment were inseparable from the social order. Work was presented as central to corporeal, spiritual, and national development. The call to work was no less than a social law and was something everyone needed to heed in order to acquire a high level of civilization. By the end of the century, a modernist truism had emerged: work not only opened the path to progress but comprehending the importance of work was a sign of the nation’s advanced status.Footnote 125 In morality books, we see these modernist truisms in their most abstract and normative forms.
Though Ottoman moralists often claimed an unbroken connection to the past and earlier texts, those claims are belied by frequent and stunning examples of novel formulations. These revolutionary transformations “were accomplished (and concealed) through new uses of old forms and tracing of a thousand lineages from the past.”Footnote 126 New meanings of terms such as sa’y u gayret (effort and ardor), kanaat (contentment), reliance on God (Tk. tevekkül; Ar. tawakkul) meskenet/miskinlik (tranquility/indolence), dünya işi (worldly work), laziness (Tk. atalet; Ar. ʿaṭāla) and others point to the emergence and proliferation of a novel usage of Islamic terminology. The goal was to purge the ‘irreligious attachments’ these terms had acquired over the centuries. These books made work the ultimate national and religious act. Moreover, authors adamantly opposed beliefs and practices that they identified as handicaps to productivity and efficiency by declaring them un-Islamic and anti-progress, and thus anti-modern. We cannot overstate the strong contribution Ottoman moralists made to the moralization and even Islamization of work.
Yağlıkçızade Ahmed Rıfat’s (1842–95) morality text, Tasvir-i Ahlak (Depiction of morality), published in 1887/8, presents these new formulations.Footnote 127 Yağlıkçızade Ahmed Rıfat (from now on Ahmed Rıfat) was born and educated in Istanbul and later went to al-Azhar in Cairo to further his studies while learning French from private tutors. There is no indication that he visited Europe. Based on the archival documents, Ahmed Rıfat seems to have spent most of his life serving the empire as a bureaucrat, specifically as an accountant at the ministry of finance, and later as a member of the Islahat Komisyonu (Reform Commission).Footnote 128 At the beginning of his book, Ahmed Rıfat explains that what sets his book apart from the traditional morality texts is his use of simple Turkish. In a humble tone, Ahmed Rıfat noted that previous scholars had left nothing new to add; therefore, he could only reiterate earlier works in simple language, “so that even children can understand.”Footnote 129 The format displays this concept of accessibility: his book is designed as an alphabetically organized list of moral terms and concepts. In this sense, it is more like a dictionary of terms related to ethics.
Of course, the author’s protestations that he is not adding anything new to the heritage are an established trope and should not be taken at face value.Footnote 130 There are numerous issues in Ahmed Rıfat’s book that demonstrate the new role morality books took on in the last half of the nineteenth century; these range from his reasons for writing the book to his articulations of novel concepts of homeland, society, and in the context of those two, the problem of laziness. Ahmed Rıfat’s reasons for writing the text far surpassed his initial stated goal of presenting morality in a simple language. He wrote this morality book because “[r]eaching spiritual and material progress that we all desire for the Muslim society can only be attained through the virtues of morality.”Footnote 131 This sentence contains many of the novel ideas of the nineteenth century, but the connection between progress and morality is especially noteworthy. The ideas of the Young Ottomans and the ideals of the Tanzimat era, in general, loom large in Ahmed Rıfat’s discussions of love for the homeland as well. Whereas in the earlier sense of the term, vatan meant one’s own town, Ahmed Rıfat used it to support an abstract notion that encompassed the lands in which Ottoman populations lived. For him, “[t]he love [for vatan] … cannot be limited to where one lives, it extends to one’s society (içinde bulunulan hey’et-i ictimaiyyeye dahi şumulu vardır).”Footnote 132 Despite his claim to follow the footsteps of classic morality books, by interlocking the novel notion of vatan with another recent term, society (hey’et-i ictimaiyye), the author establishes the grounds on which a person should and can be moral.
In connection with his conceptualization of homeland, for Ahmed Rıfat, laziness is something much more significant than a personality defect. Arguing that it can be gradually abated or reduced, he refused to excuse laziness as a difficult-to-change character trait. Indeed, change required a process. First, he didactically corrects his readers’ presumed assumption that being lazy has some value because it reflects one’s renunciation of worldly ambition. Then, he breaks the link between religious ideas and laziness (betaet – betalet). He warns his readers that abandoning all worldly activities is not an act of worship at all. Ahmed Rıfat takes great care not to dismiss the old dictums that one should not engage in worldly affairs. In fact, he accepts it, but then he goes on to define what “world” means. Referencing a Sufi saying, he defines the world as “as something that makes one ignorant of God.” Therefore, as long as one does not become “ignorant of God,” involving oneself in the activities of this world is permissible and even encouraged.Footnote 133
By redefining “world” as anything that leads one to neglect God (gaflet), Ahmed Rıfat separates the term from its previous meanings. With this twist, the world and worldly activities need not be abandoned if they do not estrange one from God. Whichever way one interprets them, states Ahmed Rıfat, “laziness and idleness cannot escape denigration.”Footnote 134 For him, it was important to show his readers that one can engage in worldly activities, as long as they do not lead one to neglect God’s will. Here, the author provides an anecdote that is narrated in the biographies of the Prophet Muhammed (siyer/siyar). When people praised a man who devoted all his time to praying, the Prophet asked: “who serves him while he is engaged in prayers?” Some responded that people volunteered to provide for him. The Prophet did not like what he heard and warned them that those people were causing him to be lazy.Footnote 135 Narrating this hadith, Ahmed Rıfat challenges the argument that Islam promotes laziness, and goes further to show that, based on Islamic principles, lazy behavior, even from those that would seem to be the most pious, cannot be tolerated.
Ahmed Rıfat even takes this a step further and causally connects laziness to poverty, thereby tying laziness to the fate of the empire. He argues that it is not poverty that causes one to be lazy; on the contrary, laziness causes poverty.Footnote 136 In a manner that critiques “tradition,” he notes that doing things in the “old ways” should no longer be considered valuable in and of itself:
Everyone ought to find effort and ardor (sa’y u gayret) necessary and take heed to increase the outcomes of work and then leave the rest to God almighty. The times have changed, and there is no value anymore in saying, “We saw our fathers doing it this way; we found it this way.”Footnote 137
In this regard, Ahmed Rıfat subscribes to the dominant liberal economic understanding of the period that poverty is a result of not working properly and sufficiently. From this issue, he continues to discuss the rich in relation to laziness. He criticizes rich and lazy people, who have a fortune without having labored for it (emeksiz servete malik olanlar). He mockingly adds that the pomp and gravity of being wealthy makes it harder to identify them as lazy. Thus, we see that the accusation of laziness cuts across class boundaries.
Many Ottoman moralists contributed to the redefinition and transformation of the term kanaat (contentment), as part of reinforcing a language that prioritized work and industriousness.Footnote 138 Part of this effort involved dissociating the virtue of kanaat from the vice of meskenet (apathy).Footnote 139 Many Ottoman moralists believed that the core of the problem of laziness was the popular belief that contentment was a religious act. For Ahmed Rıfat, contentment meant the absence of unsatiated greed. After narrating a hadith (saying) of the Prophet praising kanaat, he carefully warned his readers:
It should not be gathered [from what has been said] that poverty and meskenet are preferred. Kanaat cannot be practiced with these. Abandoning … work and leaving things to fate is not kanaat. These are the misperceptions of those who confuse laziness with trusting God (tevekkül) and deficient work with kanaat.Footnote 140
Ahmed Rıfat’s separation of laziness from trust in God (tevekkül) is an excellent example of the sustained effort to transform the meanings of certain concepts while still upholding and cherishing them. This painstaking task would be abandoned by some members of the following generation. Take, for instance, Mehmed Tayyib’s approach. A member of the ulema and a public instructor at the Fatih Mosque in Istanbul, Mehmed Tayyib published an article in 1908 titled “The Legitimacy of Work.” In it, he acknowledged kanaat as a virtue.Footnote 141 He then invited his readers to refrain from it because he believed it was a major hindrance to progress. He argued that kanaat “can only be [practiced] after Muslim society attains a secure economy and future.”Footnote 142 In comparison to Ahmed Rıfat’s efforts of rebranding the concept, Mehmet Tayyib’s position reflects a much different perspective – a radical admission that not all religious values are equal, and some virtues are a hindrance to progress, with Muslim society’s economic security having priority over them. From the perspective of Islamic jurisprudence, a jurist, remaining in the confines of Islamic norms, can choose one act/practice over the other when one is more beneficial for the public interests given in a specific context (maslaha). Mehmed Tayyib’s choice here is telling in that it results in a choice that overlaps with the values of the market economy and the political goals of nation-states. This, in turn, may mean that not all religious values can be upheld in the modern period. Pointing out that other nations advanced “by the hour,” Mehmed Tayyib stated that “retreating to a corner and secluding [oneself] in the name of kanaat and not benefiting your fellow Muslims; behaving [with] indolence [and thinking it] is in accord with God’s will, and waiting for divine help … is nothing but an abhorrent thing to do.” For Mehmed Tayyib, it was clear that the “sacred direction” (kıble/qibla, the direction of the Kaba) of Ottoman actions had to be “the salvation of the state and the community of Islam.”Footnote 143 Here was a member of the ulema, in a journal issued by the ulema, writing in the restless days following the Young Turk revolution in 1908, highlighting, in a forceful way, that what he deemed as traditional may no longer be viable in modern circumstances. Perhaps, Mehmed Tayyib, given his ulema status, was more at ease with expressing his opinion legitimized by the practice of maslaha. The differences of positions on kanaat in Ahmed Rıfat’s and Mehmed Tayyib’s writings reflect the historical contexts they were written in, as well as the variety of ways in which Muslim Ottomans engaged with religious terminology in order to promote productivity. We turn to the period following the 1908 revolution in detail in the final chapter.
Published a few years after Yağlıkçızade Ahmed Rıfat’s book, Hüseyin Remzi’s (1839–96) morality book, Ahlak-ı Hamidi presents a series of novel approaches on work and laziness.Footnote 144 Hüseyin Remzi was one of the most prolific authors of the second half of the nineteenth century. He was a distinguished military doctor who taught at various Ottoman schools, such as the Mekteb-i Mülkiye (Imperial civil service academy) and the Baytar Mektebi (Veterinary academy), and was a founding member of the Society of Ottoman Medicine. Mehmet Akif, the future national poet that we met at the beginning of this chapter, was possibly his student at the Veterinary Academy. In 1886, a year after Louis Pasteur’s discovery of the rabies vaccine, Hüseyin Remzi was sent by the Ottoman government to Paris to learn about the application of the vaccine and recent developments in microbiology from Pasteur himself.Footnote 145 He published many books for broad audiences on medicine, health, hygiene, zoology, gynecology, family life, and morality.
Ahlak-ı Hamidi presents a deontological explication of morality and clearly departs from an approach that discusses the balance of virtues and vices.Footnote 146 Unlike Ahmed Rıfat, Hüseyin Remzi does not declare his debt to classical books at the beginning of his book, although he freely references Kınalızade as well as Plato, an indication of their continued influence.Footnote 147 In a chapter devoted to the importance of work, he discusses the value of work from various perspectives. He starts with an ontological remark, making work an essential aspect of human existence: “just as birds are created to fly, human beings are created to work.”Footnote 148 Hüseyin Remzi presented work as something that needed to make a person whole. This emphasis on the ontological necessity of work is similar to the remarks of Abdullah Behcet, who published his book Behcet’ul Ahlak four years after Hüseyin Remzi published his own. Abdullah Behcet, too, viewed laziness as “the cancellation of creation’s purpose (hikmet-i hilkatin ibtali),” in diametrical opposition to the essence of human existence.Footnote 149
Two discussions of Hüseyin Remzi’s are essential for our purposes. First, he offers one of the early examples of a metaphor that many other morality texts would bring forth in different forms. This is a metaphor involving machines and factories, in which he likens the individual body to a machine and human society to a factory.Footnote 150 Later, he revisits this metaphor in his second and final morality text, Hocahanım, Hanımkızlara Dürus-u Ahlak (1897), which is discussed in the following section.Footnote 151 The factory metaphor, as explained by Hüseyin Remzi, depicts the importance of an individual’s role in the functioning of society. According to him, in this factory, all work is crucial and of equal importance –there are no differences between minor and major tasks. Therefore, he encourages his readers to complete any task at hand dutifully and with utmost care.
The factory metaphor perfectly complemented the developing deontological approach to morality. Complementing the vague language of many moralists about what they mean by work, it provided authors with an explanatory power for describing the new society they envisioned, with the aid of a readily available and captivating visual image of machinery. In this society, every individual was likened to a cog, shouldering a duty. Subsequently, the image supported the belief that an individual’s failure meant the entire population’s failure – one of the core assumptions of the culture of productivity.Footnote 152 Anson Rabinbach argues that the machine metaphor was one of the most prevalent in the nineteenth century; it “fused the diverse forms of labor in nature, technology, and society into a single image of mechanical work.”Footnote 153 Machines captivated the imagination of many nineteenth-century Ottomans, not merely as metaphors of the ideal society that worked in harmony, but also because of their inexhaustible production power. In its similarity to the human body, a machine was the ultimate hard worker, devoid of fatigue and laziness. The images of machines frequently arose in discussions about mobilizing the population for progress and setting the bar for the level of civilization.Footnote 154
The second discussion that deserves our attention in Ahlak-ı Hamidi is the author’s equation of law and order with industriousness and lawlessness with laziness. According to Hüseyin Remzi, having high morals is what makes someone comply with law and order. Having high morals, on the other hand, can be attained via being industrious. For him, being lazy leads one to be a criminal. If a person does not work, they would “sink in laziness” to the effect that they follow their own desires and illusions and thus evolve into criminals.Footnote 155 Similar remarks, as well as the factory machine metaphor, were to appear in the writings of other moralists. While not present in Hüseyin Remzi’s narrative, it would be employed to validate more intense exclusionary narratives developed in moral discourses explored in the following sections.
Here, it should be noted that not all moralists of the last quarter of the nineteenth century articulated the new tensions over the moralization of work consistently in similar manners. While Hüseyin Remzi effortlessly connects laziness with criminality and work with the integrated work of factories, he does not engage with the term kanaat as pointedly as Ahmed Rıfat did in his work. Hüseyin Remzi does not (re)define kanaat as a concept that propels one to work harder, as Ahmed Rıfat does. In a short discussion on kanaat, he defines it as a state of contentment a person should have over eating, drinking, and dressing –excessive amounts of which, according to him, are frowned upon.Footnote 156 This definition is much more in line with the earlier formulations of the term and does not reflect the new tensions articulated by some of his contemporaries, nor does it challenge or undermine his call for more productivity.
As in the example of Hüseyin Remzi’s discussion on kanaat, we can argue that the genre displayed a certain level of instability. The terms that frequently appeared in morality texts reflect a mixed practice. While some articulated new approaches to work and laziness, voicing contemporary anxieties about Ottoman productivity, others followed their precedents more closely. Certainly, shedding “attitudes, sensibilities and memories as though they were so many garments inappropriate to a singular historical movement” was not easy.Footnote 157 When explaining why laziness is a vice, Abdullah Behcet, for example, points out how it causes one to postpone otherworldy activities (umur-u uhreviye), as far worse than laziness for worldly activities.Footnote 158 Similarly, Mehmed Said’s (d. 1921) morality book, Ahlak-ı Hamide (1317/1879–80) reiterates arguments from earlier texts; he heavily borrows from al-Ghazali, Kınalızade, and Kemalpaşazade.Footnote 159 Mehmed Said states that laziness is a vice because it prevents one from “earning money in order to supply oneself the necessities to protect one’s health,” “to protect oneself from their enemies,” and “gain knowledge that will lead someone to the right path.”Footnote 160 As vague as they sound, these are the reasons that frequently appeared in pre-nineteenth-century texts as well.Footnote 161 Similarly, the term kanaat appears in some morality texts with its earlier connotations while employing new terminology in other matters. In sum, even the authors of books that reformulated terms and concepts did not always disregard classical templates in their works. Old meanings remained, and at times they were intertwined with new ones.
Such categorical instability, in which categories defied strict definitions, often became more visible during periods of great social transformation.Footnote 162 The immediate reasons for the said instability may be numerous. Do these repetitions of earlier formulations reflect the insistence of earlier meanings, or a simple act of copying from earlier sources, that is, of residual nature, or caution against the political restraints of the Hamidian period?Footnote 163 Perhaps not true for the term kanaat, but clearly, some of these choices were political. Publishing under the heavy hand of the Hamidian regime, some authors played down the new meanings of some critical terms. For example, Abdullah Behcet defined müsavat by its classical meaning (i.e., as “sharing and having partners at a beneficial event”), though in the nineteenth century, it came to mean equality and gained a political charge.Footnote 164 Nevertheless, the observed inconsistency diminished significantly by the first decade of the twentieth century, and by 1908 it was nearly extinct. Although some authors continued to refer to longstanding morality maxims, the majority engaged in new meaning universes in discussing morality and its vital concepts.
1.4.1 Gendering the Discourses of Work
From the onset, the debates about a productive nation took place in gendered narratives. Many morality authors placed both men and women of various classes at the center of productivity debates, but in a differentiated way. The established dichotomy of productivity versus laziness seemed to require that both men and women be categorized into one group or the other. What qualified them to be placed in either category differed, while the stated value and goals of work for both genders did not.Footnote 165 The appeal to the emotions when addressing female audiences, as well as their classist assumptions and gender-specific expectations, reveals how the male moralist authors imagined their audiences.
For most of the late nineteenth-century Ottoman moralists, as far as the responsibility of productivity is concerned, both men and women received equal treatment. A few years after he published his first morality book, Ahlak-ı Hamidi, Hüseyin Remzi wrote another one designated for female students. It is clear from its title, Hocahanım, hanımkızlara dürus-u ahlak (Miss teacher, morality lectures for young girls) that the book was aimed at future female teachers. It was first published in the periodical Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete,Footnote 166 which specifically addressed women and was the longest-lasting, and relatively widely circulated, periodical for women in the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 167 We find arguments similar to his earlier text when discussing the value and importance of work. As in his earlier book, Hüseyin Remzi attributes work a central role in the development of personality, morality, and society. Hocahanım, similar to the author’s earlier work, presents a deontological explication of morality. In several aspects, however, Hüseyin Remzi’s discussion on work and productivity in this book differed from his earlier general audience book.
The originality of Hüseyin Remzi’s second book lay not in the fact that it was written for female audiences – there were other morality texts written for women. Rather, its uniqueness was in how the author envisioned his readers and how that shaped the book’s format, content, and style of address in comparison with the same author’s earlier morality book. Hocahanım was written for an imaginary group of female students training to become teachers by a female morality instructor. Teaching, then, is a vocation, we can assume, Hüseyin Remzi espoused as fit for women to hold.Footnote 168 The book is organized accordingly, in a classroom setting; it presented dialogues between students and their instructor, and each chapter was titled “lecture.” Each lecture began with a question posed by the instructor about a range of moral and national concepts such as family, cleanliness, and honesty, as well as public spirit, flag, and banner, and military serviceFootnote 169 – a mixture of old concepts of morality and socially and politically charged ones.
In Hocahanım, Hüseyin Remzi introduces an image to aid in the visualization of laziness for the teachers-to-be. The female instructor in the book describes a tableau she saw in Europe – a European tableau, mediated by an imagined female Ottoman instructor to her students, in a book by a male moralist. In it, laziness was portrayed as a woman walking very slowly while leaning over the “arm of hunger.” She was depicted as a woman “whose coat was covered with spiders” and “who spent her springtime in bed, and her autumn in hospitals.” After capturing his audience’s attention with this strange tableau, Hüseyin Remzi warns of the destructive powers of laziness: laziness brings poverty and obliterates talent and knowledge. He adds that a lazy person would not only cause his/her own destruction. Because laziness is a disease, it “destroys not only the individual but even the entire population.”Footnote 170
We cannot know whether Hüseyin Remzi had seen such a tableau in his visits to Europe, but his depiction is clear: laziness is a woman. Her age is not given, but from the description, we understand that she is old, and she wears a coat covered with spiders – a person belonging to a bygone age. She is unable to move forward because of her past mistakes, such as spending her youthful years in inactivity. This portrayal presents a direct connection to be assumed between laziness and poverty, between old and undesired, between women and social diseases, and between a wrongly spent youth and eventual doom. The woman in the tableau is more than an individual. As Hüseyin Remzi warns, laziness destroys humanity.Footnote 171
When explaining the importance of work, Hüseyin Remzi does not refrain from emphasizing the same concepts and metaphors he used for the general (male?) audience. If laziness brought destruction, then work was the utmost social duty. In late Ottoman texts, the term hamiyet (patriotism) is used to describe love for one’s homeland (vatan).Footnote 172 When defining hamiyet, Hüseyin Remzi references the role of the individual in a society by employing the factory metaphor he had used in his earlier book. “Society is like a factory. … Machines work in an interconnected way, and it is impossible to separate machines apart. [What makes] the continuation of society [possible] is hamiyet.”Footnote 173 With the comprehension of the love of vatan, a person conceives her role in social life and the duty of being productive. For Hüseyin Remzi, the connection between hamiyet and the imagery of machinery is important in educating his audience on productivity, regardless of the gender of his readership.
A couple of years after Hüseyin Remzi’s Hocahanım, Ali Rıza, a governmental translator (mabeyn-i hümayun cenab-ı mülukane mütercimi), published his Kızlara Mahsus İlm-i Ahlak (Knowledge of morality for girls).Footnote 174 In the same way, Ali Rıza defined work for his female audience as an obligation. Like Hüseyin Remzi, Ali Rıza emphasized the essential role of work by pointing out that working “to human beings is just as flying is to birds.”Footnote 175 For Ali Rıza, those who did not work fought against their own nature, and these people harmed their own nation. Lest his readers would not know how important the nation is he explained it by relating it to the value of belonging to a religious community: being citizens of the same country is like being a member of the same religious community.Footnote 176 He extended the analogy further: the abstract notion of soil is a similitude of a particular faith that connects a religious community. In this nation, the individual played a crucial role – a role that affects the fate of the entire nation. In a chapter titled “Islamic morality” (Adab-ı Islamiye), Ali Rıza, similar to Hüseyin Remzi, argued that “laziness is an infectious disease, and a single lazy [person] in a society will make all the members of that society refrain from work.”Footnote 177 Within just a few pages, Ali Rıza successfully presents the morality of work to his female readers, clarifying what nation and nationhood means as well as using an exclusionary language that would increasingly operate in productivity discourses, to which we turn in the coming section.
One distinguishing characteristic of these male texts written for women is that they frequently engaged with issues on an emotional level. In these texts, happiness, love, joy, sadness, pain, and boredom are the emotional states that frequently feature in moral discussions of the value of work. In a similar vein to the representation of laziness as an old and depressed woman in Hüseyin Remzi’s Hocahanım, in Ali Rıza’s book, disciplined work is presented as a source of happiness and even the elixir of life.Footnote 178 A person who did not work was necessarily unhappy and unable to have any pleasure from leisure.Footnote 179 Women are assumed to have more spare time, which, almost always, is associated with boredom – presented as a very feminine problem. While morality literature prior to the nineteenth century addressed sorrow (hüzün) frequently, in the nineteenth century this was largely replaced by ennui.Footnote 180 Boredom, or ennui, was the foil of the new work ethos. Ali Rıza, for example, pointed out that “the soul suffers an eternal pain (azab-ı daimi) because of boredom in one’s spare time.”Footnote 181 The emphasis on emotions reveals how male moralists believed they should appeal to their female readers in convincing them of the value of work and the vice of laziness.
Another distinguishing characteristic of these texts is that they exposed assumptions regarding class and class distinctions. As duty-centered discourses advanced, home, seen as the private domain of women, emerged as the place where women were told to work with discipline.Footnote 182 The readers were usually assumed to be well-to-do urbanite women. Upper-class women, in particular, and upper-class people in general, were strongly criticized by moralists for their dependency on servants and their unwillingness to engage with their own work.Footnote 183 While some morality texts have subsections about how to treat one’s servants, young girls were encouraged to do their own work. Ali Rıza urged his female students, whom he imagined as well-to-do enough to have servants, not to leave the housework to them. The author advised future homemakers to do their own homemaking activities, revealing the type of work the author had in mind as fit for women. Young women (with wealth and status) were told that servant-dependency would cripple their abilities, and “in the future, they would not be able to be [good] housewives.”Footnote 184
What if these women became bored with the housework? Again, an emotive relationship with work was necessary. Ali Rıza wrote: “To avoid becoming bored when attending to housework, one should love effort and work (say u amel). Working brings joy and prosperity to the spirit because there cannot be a more satisfactory thing than seeing the progress of a task.”Footnote 185 Most importantly, housework was identified as social work. The female students were told to imagine that, as they do housework, they were really engaged in social work: “Every individual in this world is obliged to work [not only] for themselves, [but also] for others; therefore, you should not leave work and waste your time in vain.”Footnote 186 Appealing to their economic consciousness, Ali Rıza reminded them about the modern maxim “time is money,”Footnote 187 and claimed that it was an “Islamic saying” (kelam-ı kibar-ı Islamiyedendir).Footnote 188 In fact, the saying is attributed to Benjamin Franklin.Footnote 189
Other than housework, or as part of housework, the work designated for women was tailoring, and this was to be done primarily for the members of her household, not for the general public, both for economic and self-fulfillment purposes. All girls, even those from wealthy families, were advised to learn to sew because there was “a special pleasure in producing things.”Footnote 190 According to Ali Rıza, having these kinds of skills should not be reduced to their material benefits. He noted that work is both materially beneficial and spiritually satisfying, so he encouraged girls to learn these skills, which would be their companion in times of distress and loneliness. Resting (istirahat), then, was presented as a time for recuperating in anticipation of the next cycle of work; and rest should not be overdone.Footnote 191 For him, the idea of rest without work was an illusion.Footnote 192
Such was the range of work envisioned by the moralists, but not everyone agreed that women’s work needed to take place exclusively in the privacy of the home. Nigar Hanım, a famed poet and writer, in her piece titled “Sa’y u Amel,” first acknowledged the maxim, using duty-centered language: “the most sacred of all duties for women are household duties.”Footnote 193 However, she advanced her argument in a different manner than her male counterparts; she argued that if a woman has servants, this duty will not take most of her time and that it would be done by noon. She asked her readers, rhetorically: what would a lady be expected to do in the hours after the housework is done? She stated that activities such as visits and invitations among friends are good, but how frequently can/should one do these activities? She proclaimed that taking leisurely excursions is good for one’s health, but again, she questioned how often these activities could fill a woman’s time and also fulfill her spirit. Then, in accordance with the moralists of her time, she declared: “The most unhappy on this earth are those who waste their life killing time.” In this regard, work was a necessity for happiness. “But it is known among researchers that … every individual in their own capacity should work for the benefit of humanity.”Footnote 194 Clearly, for Nigar Hanım, the universal duty of work encompassed both genders; and the connection between happiness and work required women to get out of the house and contribute directly and openly as their male counterparts.
In congruence with the overarching argument of the period about not being a burden on the state and society, the gender-specific warnings cautioned women to actively work for their own (and the nation’s) success – at home, as many male moralists envisioned. Other than the appeal to the emotions and calls for restrictions on servant use, the universalized male-centered language of productivity, which tied the activeness of the citizen with the advancement of the nation, dominated these texts written for women.
1.4.2 Exclusionary Language: “Useless Cogs in a Magnificent Machine”
The assertive use of medical language when discussing laziness as a disease revealed yet another facet of the productivity discourses – their exclusionary properties. The moralization and nationalization of work were accompanied by an equally strong language that demonized, socially excluded, and marginalized a vague group of people deemed lazy and useless. The Ottoman moralists targeted laziness in social terms and regarded it as a hindrance to Ottoman progress. We can see a progression in how moralists dealt with the concept of laziness, from an act that individuals committed (tembellik etmek), to a discussion of individuals who are lazy (tembel insanlar), and finally to an abstraction that defined a social group, ashab-ı atalet (people of laziness). The latter concept fully reflected a characterization of lazy people not as separate individuals but as a socially cohesive group that shared not only a trait but also a mentality, undermining the empire’s path to glory. As I explore in detail in the coming chapters, the label of “people of laziness” was in fact attached to socially and politically diverse groups, who were openly held responsible for many of the maladies of the imagined nation. Moralists, particularly those published in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, however, used it in its most abstract and vague sense, developing a distinctly exclusionist language, but not identifying who these people were. In light of the development of this exclusionist language, I argue that while offering multilayered formulations about notions of productivity, morality texts, as an arena in which the characteristics of the ideal citizen and its foils were debated, reveal the deep current of otherization and exclusion that operate in the discussions on citizenry in the Ottoman Empire.
Moralists, especially in the tense and crises-laden context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, articulated an exclusionist language that operated on individual and social levels. At the individual level, Ottoman moralists presented the intelligence of lazy people “as weak, their comprehension inadequate” and dehumanized them by viewing them as “no different than animals among people.”Footnote 195 However, the exclusionist language went beyond the level of individuals. Building on the factory/machine metaphor that we have discussed earlier, Ali Rıza claimed that a lazy person “is like an unnecessary cog in a magnificent machine.”Footnote 196 In Ali Rıza’s depiction of this magnificent machine, it is obvious that those who did not produce had no role in society. Ali Rıza, after citing the Qur’anic verse “that man will only have what he has worked toward,” declared that “[l]azy people do not deserve to be alive” (tembellerin yaşamaya istihkakları yoktur). In this bold statement, Ali Rıza was questioning lazy people’s right to exist, or more generously, to be a part of the national community.Footnote 197
These exclusionary remarks were empowered by the assumed connection between laziness and crime. When discussing the necessity of effort and work (sa’y u amel) in his morality text, Abdurrahman Şeref posits that work is a universal law, without exception. After narrating the benefits of work, which range from happiness to strengthening of the human body, he arrives at the issue of law and order: “Working has an influence on law and order of the country: those who work … are always busy with their own business, [and] never desire to disturb law and order. With their success, they serve their state.”Footnote 198 At this point in his discussion of the necessity of work, Abdurrahman Şeref not only conflates lazy people with criminals but openly declares laziness a crime:
… those despicable people who do not work … want to make a living in a parasitical way, by eyeing the properties of [other] people. The weak ones become a burden to their state, and the more artful ones [of the weak] involve themselves in … fraudulent acts. [They] disturb the people, transgress law and order, and interrupt business, and the general economy. The state must occupy itself with [exposing and] terminating their crimes and spend great amounts [of wealth] and sacrifice a great deal [to do this]. From these explanations, it should be understood that people of work (erbab-ı mesai) assist our country’s order and progress while people of laziness (ashab-ı atalet) destroy this perfection and happiness.Footnote 199
The assumed criminality of laziness is obvious in these remarks, which identify lazy people as criminals even if they do not get involved in criminal activities: their mere being is a burden on the state, seen as crime. Abdurrahman Şeref’s terminology here is laden with Islamic eschatological concepts. The categorization of people as “people of laziness” and “people of work” is a clear reference to the Qur’anic verses that identify people as either ashab’al yamin and ashab’al maimanah or ashab’al shimal and ashab’al mash’amah, that is, those who are on the right (and deserving paradise) and those who are not (deserving of hellfire, Qur’an 56: 1–56). For Abdurrahman Şeref, laziness is not only a crime. It is also a defining characteristic of a group of people – as “ashab-ı atalet” they are followers of laziness. They were deemed a threat to the country’s perfection and happiness, and there needs to be a constant fight against them.
Given the almost always the vague language of the morality texts, these examples are rather drastic formulations nearing demonization. Through the moralization of productivity and valuation of hard work, what is revealed are the exclusionary visions of the late imperial reformists that deny decency and humanity to those who are deemed lazy. This deep current is accompanied by other processes, such as what I call the criminalization of laziness in the Ottoman bureaucracy, and the marginalization and criminalization of those who are deemed useless for society in various works of fiction. The exclusionary mechanisms at work became even clearer after the Young Turk revolution, a period during which polemicists of various ideologically motivated groups labeled their adversaries as lazy, and therefore, as people who should be eliminated. I explore these themes and the ramifications of exclusionary mechanisms further in the coming chapters.
1.4.3 A New Work Ethic?
With their attempt to separate Islam from a specific set of practices that they perceived to be the causes of laziness and redefine others as Islamic, we have seen in this chapter how the Muslim authors of morality texts established a strong connection between new concepts of work and Islam. As both the products and the producers of change, Ottoman moralists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century constructed a new knowledge while also referencing the rich symbolic universe of Islamic norms. When doing so, they were responding to the possible objections to modern notions and practices, as well as refuting the Orientalist claims that portrayed Islam as the cause of laziness, and therefore, of the backwardness of Muslim societies. Central to their knowledge production was their formulation of productivity as vital both for the individual and the nation, Islamizing it on both levels.
I argue that morality texts, when discussing the importance of productivity, employed the term ‘Islamic’ interchangeably with the term ‘modern.’ By advancing arguments fortified with verses from the Qur’an and sayings of Muhammed (ahadith), they made religion integral to modern practices. Ottoman moralists presented certain practices and notions as un-Islamic and others as Islamic, drawing boundaries and defining the norms; thus, they were involved in producing knowledge unique to this period. If laziness was un-Islamic, it was also antithetical to progress, and vice versa. Although the concept was coined in a later period, Ottoman moralists laid the groundwork for an “Islamic work ethic” – now a widely used concept, both in popular parlance and in academic writing.Footnote 200
In the historiography, some perceived morality books of this period as “religious texts,” following the tracks of a supposedly unchanging genre since medieval times.Footnote 201 Even if they are to be conceived as religious texts, religious texts (and religious ideas and practices) are neither static nor monolithic. Moreover, considering Islam, or any religion, as a fixed category neglects the fact that this category was a historically formulated and produced classification.Footnote 202 At times, morality books were examined with an instrumentalist approach, disregarding their dynamism and novel content. Some argued that the increasing dominance of morality in the Ottoman public discourse of the nineteenth century was a response to the perceived dangers posed by “Western” practices and modes of thinking.Footnote 203 Presented as a state-supported project of Abdulhamid II to induce loyalty to the palace and morality envisioned by it, the emphasis on morality education was viewed as a project that aimed to provide “Islamic content” to an adopted Western educational system in an attempt to make it authentic.Footnote 204
Viewing morality books of the nineteenth century as the latest incarnation of an unchanging genre or as texts written to introduce Islamic content filling in Western forms of education betrays the reality of morality texts of this period. The idea that morality books were defensive in nature and were written to maintain and amplify the influence of Islam in “Westernized” schools overlooks several issues. These approaches assume a static binary, set in two differentiated fields, as form (modern) and content (Islamic), as if never the twain shall meet. Moreover, the moralization of the new self and society passed far beyond the Hamidian “corrective measures” for “combating negative effects of Western penetration into the Ottoman Empire.”Footnote 205 Even if the Hamidian government’s intention was to induce loyalty through Islamic moral narratives added to the school curriculum, this was only one aspect of the morality of the period, an aspect that privileges the state as the only agent and creator of intentions. Trying to explain social changes “in terms of motives is always a doubtful business.”Footnote 206 Rather than seeing these public debates merely as a product of the “Hamidian reaction … derived from the desire to ward off foreign encroachment,”Footnote 207 they should be addressed as part of the larger transformations surrounding the moralization of the subject-citizen and the nation, with the Hamidian project being a part of this phenomenon.Footnote 208
Writing is a technology of power. Moralists were powerful in the manner in which they articulated the norms and identified the beneficial and the useless, developing exclusionary narratives in texts that seemingly appeared as apolitical and timeless. Moralists made their texts the strongest channel in which to discuss work, laziness, and industriousness in a highly moralized way; thus, they crowned work ethos as the central issue of the new political self and society. They popularized new terms and new meanings of already established concepts, through which they contributed to the normative basis of an emergent culture of productivity.
