Mechanical Clocks, Divine Rhythms: Timekeeping, Cosmology, and Power in the Ottoman Empire

European travelers in the nineteenth century often found the Ottomans to be ‘indifferent of time,’ or lacking a ‘sense of time,’ attributes that were sometimes associated with their alleged 'fanaticism.' Modern scholars too tended to reduce Ottoman temporality to its religious dimension and discuss it in contradistinction to a similarly uniform, one-dimensional ‘modern’ time conciousness. Mechanical clocks, alledgedly the representatives of secular, ‘empty’ and homogenous time, were usually identified with the latter. According to most accounts, they remained somewhat alien to indigenous Ottoman culture. Modern scholars thus seem to agree with contemporary observers that prior to the second half of the nineteenth century, the Ottomans did not use clocks to organize time, or that they did not use them ‘correctly.'

Relying on a wide range of archival and literary sources, I examine the use of clocks in the Ottoman Empire not against some model cast along late nineteenth century, western European lines, but in terms of the temporal practices and needs of the Ottomans themselves. I show that the Ottomans of the early modern period saw no inherent contradiction between mechanical clocks and their understanding of time as  part of a divine order. They subjected their use of clocks to a temporality that bound together heaven and earth, society and nature, and the fate of humans with the course of planets. Yet, despite first appearance, there was nothing 'natural' about this temporality. In fact, my main argument here is that by claiming correlation with divine rhythms, hegemonic temporality served to legitimize and reaffirm the very mundane social order presided over by the Ottomans. The very same mechanisms that kept and organized time also stamped it with political and religious authority.