The Religion of the Other: Essays in Honour of Mohamed Talbi

Abstract

address the relationship between the triumph of European time and the formation of a Turkish state. The fact that the Ottomans accepted standardised time while not disavowing other temporalities in their governance was neither part of an atavistic commitment to tradition nor part of an Orientalist tendency toward bureaucratic bloating and increasing unmanageability. Rather than adopting a negative view of Ottoman history, this volume points out that the diversity of times existing and thriving in the Ottoman Empire was an extension of the diversity of times that operated at the individual level. Koç’s essay on Saʿdullah Effendi illustrates the fact that diverse, seemingly incommensurable, worldviews could be adhered to by a single individual. In this case, a Muslim’s commitment to piety did not preclude his acceptance of the prophetic powers of astrology. Kreiser’s essay on clock towers points out how a town’s single tower served as a marker of multiple temporalities by announcing Muslim and Christian prayer times as well as the start and end of, and breaks in, the workday. These and other essays all point to an Ottoman ease with, and even adeptness at, managing social diversity. The essays in section three demonstrate the rise of standardised time within the Ottoman Empire but also how its rise was conditioned by its usefulness to the Ottoman administration. Wishnitzer’s essay on the place of standardised time in late Ottoman military reform is an illustrative example. The essays in section four deal with the Turkish Republic as the site of tensions and contradictions due to the displacement of other temporalities as standardised, European time came to dominate the functioning of daily life under the nation-state. The general set of ideas about time and temporalities in the Ottoman Empire that the essays in this volume take up and promote is compelling. The disparate topics covered mean that virtually any specialist in Ottoman Studies or the history of the Middle East will find something of interest and possibly even of conceptual and analytical inspiration in this volume.