Edinburgh University Press
Edinburgh Studies on the Ottoman Empire
Fénelon, Offenbach and the Iliad in Arabic, Robinson Crusoe in Turkish, the Bible in Greek-alphabet Turkish, excoriated French novels circulating through the Ottoman Empire in Greek, Arabic and Turkish – literary translation at the eastern end of the Mediterranean offered worldly vistas and new, hybrid genres to emerging literate audiences in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Whether to propagate ‘national’ language reform, circulate the Bible, help audiences understand European opera, argue for girls’ education, institute pan-Islamic conversations, introduce political concepts, share the Persian Gulistan with Anglophone readers in Bengal, or provide racy fiction to schooled adolescents in Cairo and Istanbul, translation was an essential tool. But as these essays show, translators were inventors. And their efforts might yield surprising results.
Contrary to the stereotypical images of torture, narcotics and brutal sexual abuse traditionally associated with Ottoman or 'Turkish' prisons, Kent Schull argues that, during the Second Constitutional Period (1908–1918), they played a crucial role in attempts to transform the empire. It was within these prisons' walls that many of the pressing questions of Ottoman modernity were worked out; questions of administrative centralisation, Islamic criminal law and punishment, gender and childhood, prisoner rehabilitation, bureaucracy, identity and social engineering.
