Download PDF | Mostafa Minawi - Losing Istanbul_ Arab-Ottoman Imperialists and the End of Empire-Stanford University Press (2022).
326 Pages
This book is the product of over a decade’s worth of research that took me across archives and libraries from London to Damascus. I spent years re-membering the fragments of the lives of Arab-Ottoman imperialists and their family members who lived over a hundred years ago in Istanbul. Even though they lived lives that could not be more different than mine— privileged elites born and raised in a wealthy provincial notable family who spent their careers near the pinnacle of a bygone imperial world—I have been driven by more than academic curiosity to understand their experiences. It took me years to understand that a large part of my interest was personal. They occupied a liminal space in a dying imperial world order; spent their lives adjusting to global forces of political, cultural, and social change that were well beyond their control; and eventually found themselves having to make very difficult life choices as the home they knew no longer existed and the society they understood themselves to be a part of rejected them for the intimate recent past they represented.
As the great-grandchild of Beirutis who lived through the loss of the end of the Ottoman Empire, never acknowledged national borders that separated the people of Bilad al-Sham, and raised a global family through decades of regional instability; as the grandchild of a Beiruti grandmother and a Jerusalemite grandfather who started a family in Jaffa and never quite recovered from their sudden exile from Palestine; as the son of Palestinian refugees who grew up “stateless” in Beirut and as a queer man in search of a tribe across Southwest Asia, Europe, and North America, I was drawn to the story of Arab-Ottomans in Istanbul and their experience of tenuous belonging, rejection, and loss. Though more than a century and a continent removed, I understood what it meant to live through global changes that render one disoriented, one’s loyalties suspect, and one’s very existence the subject of debate and controversy.
Just like the path a human life takes, the course of researching this book was long and winding. There was no plan, no ultimate goal, and no roadmap to follow. It was in many ways similar to exploring what architect Somaiyeh Falahat called hazar-tu, or a “thousand insides,” of cities like old Tunis, Isfahan, and Fez.1 At every turn, a new part of the city presents itself to the pedestrian, like a map unfolding a thousand times. Although Shafiq and Sadik belonged to a global imperial class of men and women who left some archival traces, they did not leave the historian a roadmap of their lives across social spaces, time, and continents.
They were grand historical characters but also ordinary people whose lives were thousands of insides folded upon themselves. At every turn, a new detail revealed itself that took me to a discovery or led down a dead end. Even with a historian’s patience, endless starts and stops made this research a long-term project that had to accompany me as I researched other projects. Along the way, I wrote and published The Ottoman Scramble for Africa and a few articles on Ottoman imperialism and international relations— important detours that also took me on new adventures and challenged my perception of Ottoman history from the inside out.2 It also liberated me to follow paths that had not been followed before, with no signposts and with nothing to go on but the clues that slowly emerged. Between 2008 and 2021, I gathered and translated data and connected the dots whenever I had the time to do research and look over an interview or a new source of information I had come across.
I had to make sense of disparate pieces of data and recognize the moment when I had enough to “know” these Arab-Ottoman families outside of the old theoretical frameworks of late nineteenth-century Ottoman historiography, such as the debates over Ottoman exceptionalism, the decline thesis, identity, anti-orientalist telling of Ottoman history, or the origin of different forms of nationalism in the region. What emerged is a book about the complexities of lived experiences that require a deep understanding of the ever changing political and social context that ArabOttoman imperialists lived in and the embrace of a multitude of dimensions, often contradictory and fuzzy, the sum total of which makes up a colorful human life. It took exceptional circumstances for me to finally embark on the writing process.
As I experienced major events over the past couple of years— living in Beirut during the Lebanese October 2019 revolution, surviving the Beirut Port blast in August of 2020, and navigating the perils of a global pandemic—it all started to make sense. Working on a laptop that bore the scratches and scrapes of flying shards of glass from the Port blast, it occurred to me that history, for most people, is about recounting intimate experiences of lived moments. When it comes down to it, people often want to understand, empathize, or imagine how an event felt and how it impacted real people’s lives. How was it to experience a revolution from the inside? What was it like to live through a pandemic? How did the blast feel, and what impact did surviving it have on personal and professional priorities? That is how most people internalize history—the sum total of experiences of lives lived. It is rarely about figures or dates or large sociopolitical patterns or epic wars observed from above.
In the safety and isolation of Ithaca and then Budapest, I wrote to process this moment of global and personal crisis the best way I knew how. The result is a book that approaches the study of humanities at its most essential essence—an attempt to make sense of one’s experience in the world, through the understanding of others’ experiences, even people who might otherwise seem far removed temporally, geographically, and morally from one’s own life. Lastly, I wanted this book to be an invitation to reconsider the history of the Ottoman Empire as the shared heritage of the peoples of all successor states and not as it is mostly taught now, a prehistory of modern Turkey alone.
Forced amnesia about the diversity of the ruling elites of Istanbul has distorted a relatively recent history of belonging that has contemporary reallife implications. Perhaps the dire effects of this unchecked amnesia can best be felt when former members of the same empire, like citizens from Syria and Turkey, find themselves living in close proximity in Istanbul. One has to wonder how a better understanding of the history of the empire as a shared past that people of many countries can claim, “warts and all,” would impact the lives of Syrians, Lebanese, Bulgarians, Palestinians, Iraqis, Armenians, Turks, Kurds, and others living, once more, side by side in their former imperial capital.
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