Chapter 4 describes the debates that took place in the press immediately after the Balkan Wars (1912–13), which drew attention to the relationship between new concepts of the able body and the militarization of discourses of productivity. In the first Balkan War, the Ottoman armies were soundly defeated, and the empire lost its last landholdings in the Balkans. The perceived infirmities of the “Ottoman body” became a common thread in social critiques calling for all-out mobilization. This chapter traces the relationship between conceptualizations of the healthy, productive, and able body and discourses on the formation of an ideal citizen, as articulated by moralists, journalists, public figures, and memoirists of the Balkan Wars. I expose how calls for a productive body militarized a social issue during a time when Ottomans faced imminent threats of invasion. The militarization that characterized the last decade of the Ottoman Empire and the first decades of the Turkish Republic cannot be understood without first considering the process by which the body of the citizen became a site of national anxiety.

Chapter 5 focuses on the elusive boundary between the lazy and the industrious in the post-1908 Young Turk era. In this tumultuous period, the Ottoman culture producers employed the concepts of work and laziness to further develop the exclusionary language characteristic of the culture of productivity against their rivals. Surveying political pamphlets, journals, memoirs, and the daily press, this chapter shows how various ideological camps entered into a cultural struggle over who should be regarded as lazy and useless based on a putative association with “super Westernization” or with “anti-progressivism.” In the relatively open political atmosphere immediately following the 1908 revolution, the polemics between various political agents, usually dubbed “Westernists” and “Islamists,” signalled a vital debate on the ideal citizen required by the nation. Their views of these issues diverged greatly, as did the question of who should be labeled lazy and unproductive. Such labels marshaled the exclusionary language that has been in development, revealing a variety of models of reform in the public sphere and how each one regarded the other as the cause of laziness.

Chapter 1 examines the moralization of work and stigmatization of laziness in the works of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottoman moralists between the first and the second constitutional period (the 1870s to 1908). At the center of this chapter are Ottoman morality texts, a genre, yet to be fully explored, reconfigured in the nineteenth century. These texts articulated many emerging discourses and anxieties of the Ottoman reform period on a normative level. After an overview of the question of laziness in Ottoman thinking, attention is drawn to how a novel kind of knowledge was produced in the field of morality, expressing a new subjectivity in relation to modern citizenship; the normative nature of morality texts and the way these texts moralized, nationalized, and even Islamized productivity is then studied. Ottoman moralists identified certain beliefs and practices as handicaps for productivity and declared them un-Islamic and antithetical to progress. This chapter rethinks the construction of morality and Islamic knowledge in modern times, by examining deontological discourses on work that later produced the neologism of the “Islamic work ethic.”