Table Of ContentOTTOMAN TULIPS, OTTOMAN COFFEE
To my parents, Amal and Wael, whose names mean
exactly what they have given me: Hope and Refuge
OTTOMAN TULIPS,
OTTOMAN COFFEE
Leisure and Lifestyle in the
Eighteenth Century
Edited by Dana Sajdi
Tauris Academic Studies
LONDON • NEW YORK
Published in 2007 by Tauris Academic Studies, an imprint of
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Copyright © 2007, Dana Sajdi
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Contents
List of Tables and Figures vi
Notes on Contributors vii
Preface, Note on Transliteration and Acknowledgements ix
1. Decline, its Discontents and Ottoman Cultural History:
By Way of Introduction
Dana Sajdi 1
2. The Perception of Saadabad: The ‘Tulip Age’ and
Ottoman–Safavid Rivalry
Can Erimtan 41
3. The First Ottoman Turkish Printing Enterprise:
Success or Failure?
Orlin Sabev (Orhan Salih) 63
4. Nahils, Circumcision Rituals and the Theatre State
Babak Rahimi 90
5. Janissary Coffee Houses in Late Eighteenth-Century
Istanbul
Ali Çaksu 117
6. The Heart’s Desire: Gender, Urban Space and the
Ottoman Coffee House
Alan Mikhail 133
Notes 171
References 224
Index 257
List of Tables and Figures
Tables
3.1 Book sales and sale percentages of the
Müteferrika Press 89
5.1 Some Zorba proprietors and their coffee houses 132
Figures
3.1 Sale percentages of Tercümetü’s-Sihāh-i Cevheri
[Lugat-i Vānkūlu], 1141/1729 84
3.2 Sale percentages of Tuhfetü’l-Kibār,
Tārīh-i Seyyāh, Hindi’l-Garbī, Tārīh-i Tīmūr,
Tārīhü’l-Mısır, 1141–42/1729–30 84
3.3 Sale percentages of Gülşen-i Hulefā, 1143/1730 85
3.4 Sale percentages of Grammaire turque, 1730 85
3.5 Sale percentages of Usūlü’l-Hikem, Mıknātısiyye,
1144/1732; Ahvāl-i Gazavāt der Diyār-i Bosna,
1154/1741 86
3.6 Sale percentages of Kitāb-ı Cihānnümā,
1145/1732 86
3.7 Sale percentages of Takvīmü’t-Tevārīh,
1146/1733 87
3.8 Sale percentages of Tārīh-i Nacīmā, 1147/1734 87
3.9 Sale percentages of Tārīh-i Rāşid Efendi, Tārīh-i
Çelebizāde Efendi, 1153/1741 88
3.10 Sale percentages of Ferheng-i Şucūrī, 1155/1742 88
vi
Notes on Contributors
CAN ERIMTAN is an independent scholar. He received a D.Phil.
in 2003 in modern history from Oxford University, where he
wrote a thesis on the historiography of the ‘tulip age’. In 2004–5,
he was research fellow at the British Institute of Archeology at
Ankara, where he worked on the perception of the Hittites in
early republican Turkey. He was senior fellow at the Institute of
Anatolian Civilizations, Istanbul.
ALI ÇAKSU is assistant professor and chair of the Department of
Philosophy, Fatih University, Istanbul. From 2000 to 2006, he
was a research fellow at the Research Centre for Islamic History,
Art and Culture (IRCICA), a subsidiary organ of the Organization
of the Islamic Conference (OIC). He earned his BA in 1991 from
the Department of Political Science and International Relations at
Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. He received his MA in Islamic
thought in 1993, and a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1999, from the
International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization
(ISTAC), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
ALAN MIKHAIL is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of
History at the University of California, Berkeley. His interests
include the history of science, agricultural history and the cultural
history of Ottoman cities. He has published numerous articles in
Arabic on various topics in Egyptian history, and is currently
writing a dissertation on the cultural history of water, irrigation
and health in Ottoman Egypt.
BABAK RAHIMI is assistant professor of Islamic Studies at the
vii
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Department of Literature, Program for the Study of Religion,
University of California, San Diego. Rahimi received his BA from
the University of California, San Diego, his MA from the
University of Nottingham, and his Ph.D. in 2004 from the
European University Institute’s Department of Social and Political
Science. He was a visiting fellow in the Department of
Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political
Science, 2000–2001. He has published articles in Iranian studies
and critical theory and historical sociology; his main research
interest evolves around state–society relations in Islamic societies.
ORLIN SABEV (ORHAN SALIH) is a research fellow at the
Institute of Balkan Studies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia.
He received his Ph.D. from the same institution in 2000. His
dissertation on Ottoman educational institutions in Bulgarian
lands between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries was pub-
lished in Bulgarian under the title Ottoman Schools in Bulgarian
Lands 15th–18th Centuries (Sofia: Ljubomadrie-Chronia, 2001).
His second book, also in Bulgarian, The First Ottoman Journey in
the World of Printed Books (1726–1746): a Reassessment (Sofia:
Avangard Prima, 2004) is now forthcoming in Turkish. He
received the Professor Marin Drinov Prize for Young Scholars of
the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in 2002.
DANA SAJDI is a post-doctoral fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg
zu Berlin. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in
2002. She was assistant professor of Middle East history at
Concordia University, Montreal, 2002–4; and a Mellon fellow at
Princeton University 2004–5. She is currently working on a
monograph entitled The barber of Damascus: nouveau literacy in
the early modern Middle East. On the subject of her book, she has
published an award winning article ‘A room of his own: the
“history” of the barber of Damascus (fl. 1762)’ (The MIT
Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies, 4 (2004), pp. 19–35).
viii
Preface, Note on
Transliteration and
Acknowledgements
The present volume is a result of a conference, ‘Rethinking
culture in the Ottoman eighteenth century’, which took place in
Princeton on 15–16 January 2005. Although a very large number
of excellent proposals were submitted in response to the call for
papers, all things being equal, priority of participation was given
to junior/graduate students and international scholars. After the
conclusion of the conference, a committee of five senior and
junior scholars was formed for the purpose of selecting the
conference papers to be published. Once chosen, the papers were
sent out for anonymous peer review and subsequently revised by
the authors. Thus, this volume is the end result of a long process
that could not have been completed without the work and dedi-
cation of a number of colleagues.
Given the multilinguistic legacy of the Ottoman Empire,
however, no attempt has been made to privilege any one of the
relevant Middle Eastern languages in terms of transliteration,
especially with regard to shared terms between Arabic, Persian
and Ottoman. Similarly, the choice of rendering titles and names
into English or Turkish has been left to the individual authors.
I offer my first consignment of gratitude to Michael Cook, who
invited me ‘to organize a conference on the eighteenth century’.
To that end, he entrusted me with some of his Mellon Foundation
grant funds with no strings attached. He interfered in neither
conceptualization nor logistics; however, he always came through
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