Ethnicity and Etiquette in an Empire

That the Ottoman Empire housed a remarkable human diversity has become all but a truism. And yet, most examinations of this diversity have focused on religious communities and their legal/bureaucratic administration by the state. We know precious little about how individuals conceptualized and dealt with the ethnic variation of the empire they inhabited.

I would like to offer a glimpse of one major arena in which ethnic and cultural difference was produced and contested, namely Ottoman social gatherings. As the main point of entry into a new locale for the Ottoman traveler, these meetings are amply described in travel accounts, biographical dictionaries, tezkires and etiquette manuals—some of these texts were even composed within such meetings.

Focusing both on Damascenes traveling to Istanbul and Rumis visiting Damascus in the century following the incorporation of the Arab provinces, I hope to show the way in which Ottoman social gatherings at once produced and bridged cultural difference. On the one hand, it was here that a rūmī came to be distinguished from the abnā’ al-‘arab: language, comportment, and the command of a set of literary references became markers of a particular educational and cultural background. Yet at the same time, there was a concerted effort on the part of scholars—from Badr al-Din al-Ghazzi to Gelibolulu Mustafa ‘Ali—to standardize this culture of sociability in a way that would ease circulation within the empire. By highlighting this tension between cultural diversity and efforts to establish a pan-Ottoman culture of sociability, I hope to shed light on the way in which contemporaries understood and shaped the empire’s changing human geography.