Ottoman History Podcast - Naked Anxieties in the Baths of Ottoman Aleppo

Episode Date: October 8, 2015

with Elyse Semerdjian hosted by Chris Gratien Download the episode Podcast Feed | iTunes | Soundcloud Bath houses or hamams were mainstays of the Ottoman city. But as semi-public spaces where people could mix and implicitly transgressed certain boundaries regarding nudity, they were also spaces that produced anxiety and calls for regulation. In this episode, Elyse Semerdjian discusses how in a certain time and place of eighteenth century Aleppo, the issue of Muslim and Christian women bathing together aroused the concern of Ottoman state and society. « Click for More »

Hello and welcome to another episode of Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Chris Grayton. This episode is, I guess, the latest episode in a series of episodes that deals with hammams or bathhouses in the Ottoman Empire. I mean, this isn't a series that we planned, but it seems like we keep coming back to the issue of bathhouses. With Nina Eragon, we talked about the socio-political landscape of Istanbul through the bathhouse. And in an earlier episode, we talked to Burkay Pasin about how baths in the Bosphorus were kind of this intermediary point between the hammam and the beach. So the life of the bathhouses reveals all these interesting issues in the history of the Ottoman Empire.

And our guest today is another historian who's looked at some really very fascinating dynamics inside the bathhouses of Aleppo. She's Professor Elise Samarjian, an associate professor in the Department of History at Whitman College in Walla Walla. She is the author of a book entitled Off the Straight Path, which dealt with sort of issues surrounding illicit sex and various aspects of the Sharia courts in early modern Aleppo. And she's the author of a number of articles, including an article about the Ottoman government essentially being involved in regulating or policing nudity and contact between people in the bathhouses of Aleppo. So without further ado, Professor Samerjian, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me.

We're very happy to have you on. I enjoyed reading your article about the bathhouses in Aleppo. So without further ado, Professor Samerjian, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. We're very happy to have you on. I enjoyed reading your article about the bathhouses in Aleppo. And so in tandem with Nina's talk about sort of studying, for example, urban migration through the workers in the bathhouses, I thought your article is a nice complement to looking at the early modern hammam space through the lenses of gender, but also communal politics in Aleppo. So let's start with the title of the article you like these uh it's a good title I mean naked anxieties for our listeners you can find the bibliographical information on our website out of mystery podcast.com but let's talk about these naked anxieties what are you referring to I mean the bathhouse is a place where people are naked, but. Well, I mean, I think from the standpoint of juridical literature, we can find a lot of discussion about nudity, what constitutes nudity, and that nudity is defined in

different contexts, especially when we're talking about Muslim women, although the rules also apply to men. So there are a number of different anxieties around nudity and covering. And of course, the bathhouse presents a very important problem for covering because as we can see with some of the cases I looked at, there still were requirements to cover in the bathhouse, the aura or that particular space defined as nudity within different parameters. But how are you going to regulate that in a space that simultaneously you need to expose yourself in order to properly clean? And so then that anxiety, it's cross-cultural, of course. It's not particular to Muslims at all.

But what's interesting is how much Muslim jurists like to talk about it and work through these problems, whether it's in fatawa or in fiqh literature. And in this case, the core of the cases were Sharia court cases that I used. And so the hammam is sort of a space where bodies are in contact in ways that are uh not um typically sanctioned at least within whatever we can understand is the the public sphere right so it's some some space between the the home and uh the street so to speak in that regard yeah exactly yeah it's going to bring different groups, different bodies together that typically would not be in close proximity. But it also, I mean, interestingly brings different communities. I started to see, I started to discover them one by one. And I guess first glance, you would think,

what's the problem with women bathing together, right? Because as long as women are not mixing with men, you would think, perhaps just at a glance, that it shouldn't be a problem, but it is indeed a problem. Not only in the Ottoman context, but also from the standpoint of Sharia, where we can find even references in Hadith that are sometimes cited by jurists to say that non-Muslims should not be in the mosque space or near bathhouses. Okay, so it's not that women shouldn't be bathing together or that there's rules regarding women bathing. It's that certain women shouldn't be bathing with other women. Yeah, especially Muslim women in this context, you know, sometimes the cases would use the term,

the sanctity of Muslim women that needs to be preserved. And for that reason, non-Muslim women shouldn't be able to see them exposed. And we have to wonder, some jurists wrote this, but was this actually a practical concern across time that was actually acted upon? I think it was impractical. And I think that's why my cases are really only for a 70-year period in the 18th century from 1726 to 1795. And that's where the anxiety comes into play as well, that there's really something about that period of time, the 18th century, where these boundaries are getting created and reified, and not only from the direction of Muslim jurists, but also we have Christians who are writing about it as well. They're concerned about Christian women who are behaving inappropriately or dressing inappropriately, doing things they shouldn't be doing.

And the idea, it seems as though each community is actually concerned with some sort of contamination. It seems as though each community is actually concerned with some sort of contamination. And so the bathhouse becomes really symbolic of that potential contamination as well. All right, welcome back. All right, welcome back. Chris Creighton talking to Professor Elise Samerjian about her research on anxieties about nudity and contact of bodies in the bathhouses of early modern Aleppo and specifically 18th century Aleppo. period in which there was a rising concern about contact between different communities, or perhaps contamination of these communities and women in the bathhouse serves as an extension of like sort of a larger conflict or political anxiety, let's say. Before we get into that, I want to ask about some of the cases you've examined in your research, cases that came up in the Sharia court records regarding bathhouses, and some of the tensions they reveal at the time. So some of our listeners will have a little sense

of what's in a Sharia court record, but what is the context in the court what are the context within which bodies in the bathhouse enter sort of the documentary record well the major omission is that we don't actually have women coming to the court in these cases it's contracts between men which tells us a lot about this the nature of the the issue that i mean this is really an anxiety that men are having about women in contact more than one that women are having themselves. And it's about men regulating women's bodies. And there was not a single case in which a woman appeared at court, but they were mostly contracts between the court and the guilds, that the guilds were told by the court that they were in violation, that they were allowing Muslim and non-Muslim women to bathe at the same time

and that they needed to separate them. And so they would agree to adhere to a very complex schedule in which certain community members are allowed to use certain bathhouses on certain days. And so maybe Christian women would get to bathe on a Thursday, Muslim women would get to bathe on a Wednesday. And what I noticed was the bathhouses that were being listed were actually bathhouses that were in non-Muslim neighborhoods. And so it's important that these are measures being taken in non-Muslim neighborhoods with the idea of really assuring that when Muslim women used those bathhouses in non-Muslim neighborhoods

that they were not in contact with non-Muslim women at the same time. And then these were not exclusively for women, but most of the cases were. I discovered 10 cases over the course of the century. It doesn't seem like a lot, but I'm really just looking at the regulation itself and thinking about why it occurred when it did because it did not occur during my survey of the other centuries and other periods of time. Oh, so we presume that this was not something

that was being policed at that time or maybe kind of informally there was such a thing or what's your take on that? You know, it's it's it's hard um it's hard to say but i mean i think if there was a stronger hand with regulation because of the nature of regulation and the way that the guilds were brought to the court on a number of different matters we would have seen it if indeed it was a concern that's interesting i think that it perhaps wasn't a concern at those times as much as it was

for the 18th century 17th century for example you didn't find it not at all and this is just uh separating women men men as well but in a different way like men actually weren't separated physically but they were separated um start like sartorial uh in a sartorial way by wearing particular garments. Like, for example, they would wear towels with particular markings so that they would be marked out as non-Muslim in that space, but they could indeed bathe at the same time as Muslim men. I mean, the irony, too, is Muslim men are subject to very similar modesty regulations. And we have jurists like Ibn Abdeen who will talk to us about specific body parts that constitute nudity on a male body.

And it seems as though the court was following that in some way because the towels also needed to be lengthened in order to cover the areas that constitute the aura for a muslim male between the naval enemies essentially and there's one translation yeah the privates definitely yeah so the aura can have have that many different meanings but yeah privates is probably the best way to define it in this context and so there is a complaint that the towels were too short and that genitalia was exposed. And that complaint comes to court, and so the guild's keepers come with... That sounds like a pretty short towel. It must have been very short.

But anyway, separate issue. Yeah, so too short to actually constitute a good covering. So they actually brought the guild, and the guild promised to have towels of certain length made by the towel makers in order to assure that Auro was not exposed on men. So the male cases aren't as frequent as the female. But you're saying this anxiety is rooted in a particular

historical context, right? This is not a, I mean, i know you mentioned some jurists who talk about bathhouses as really dens of vice but there's also differing legal opinions right across time about these kinds of bodily contacts so do you see like an increase uh surrounding discourses regarding sort of same-sex relations that are occurring in the bathhouses at this time. This is something that writers had commented upon in the past. Yeah, I mean- Is that part of that anxiety?

I mean, it's not in the sources I looked at, but there is this link. I had to sort of figure out why non-Muslim women were a problem in particular. And there is this problem with desire or shahwa. And the jurists do talk about the fact that there's a potential, this was my conclusion, was that basically the non-Muslim woman is problematic because she's a conduit for male desire. It's the idea that she could potentially report what she sees to other men. That's the core issue.

That could have happened. I mean, you know, women did talk about what they saw in the bathhouse, but anyway. Yeah. So the women are like extensions of the men, so to speak, who are extensions of a community, of the men, so to speak, who are extensions of a community, so to speak. And so, I mean, it really puts something like adult swim that we have in the US. I always took for granted

that the kids are supposed to swim at the public swimming pool at one time and adults at another, but it puts it in a little historical context. Why do adults and kids need to swim separately? Here, we have to ask the same question. Why on earth in this time period in the latter

half of the 18th century would muslims and christians need to bathe separately very fast i mean i mean an anthropologist would you know look at mary douglas and talk about how well of course muslim women and non-muslim women have to bathe separately but um but there had to be something more to it and there was a court case from 1762, I believe was the date. And it actually said that the non-Muslim woman, when she sees the Muslim woman nude, she's gendered male. She becomes a man. And of course, she doesn't literally become a man, but it's really about her becoming the conduit for a male gaze at that point. But the irony is that one jurist actually that I found said that reporting what you see in a bathhouse

or in a private setting is actually okay if you're reporting some of the nature of a woman's appearance to a man who has the desire to perhaps marry her. So in that sense, it's okay. It's halal. But when you have a situation in which it's a non-Muslim woman just sort of gabbing about a woman, God knows what she's saying.

But anyway, talking about her body shape or her hair and that sort of thing, then it's a different kind of... It would presumably... I mean, the logic there is that then non-Muslim men could desire that woman for marriage, right? That's what you're... Or even just it's being done in a spirit that isn't about actually matchmaking, I guess, in the other context.

Oh, okay. But that's how I understood it. But still, I mean, yeah, maybe you don't want non-Muslim men desiring Muslim women either. Welcome back. We're talking with Professor Elise Samargian about her, really her article published in IJMIS regarding the bathhouses of early modern Aleppo and Aleppo in the 18th century. And we've been talking about some of the ways in which anxieties about the contact of particularly women,

Muslim women with non-Muslim women in the hammams, fed into, I guess, a larger social context about anxieties, about boundaries between Muslims and Christians in general. And Professor Samerjian, what I've understood from what you're saying is that contrary to being a universal anxiety that existed in Muslim societies or in Syrian or Aleppine society across time, that you find this anxiety about bathhouse contact to be rooted in a specific

historical context so i mean what do you make of this what's going on between um you know in understandings of community uh in aleppo during this time period or in the ottoman empire during this time period that you think is causing anxiety about the bathhouse and bathhouse mixing well i actually got to benefit from some work of other scholars like Donald Kortert and Madeline Zilfie who have talked about the way that the rapid consumption of the 18th century produced anxieties as non-Muslims and Muslims were starting to look more like each other

because they were consuming similarly. And so this, in particular, we can think about different kinds of fashions that emerged in the 18th century that we really have the Ottoman Empire incorporated into a more global economy. And so there are certain products that become, certain products like, I'm not even sure how to pronounce it, if it's ermine fur, certain kinds of furs and different kinds of textiles that I clearly don't wear, but certain kinds of furs that become a point of anxiety for the empire that they try to bar people

from certain social classes, particularly non-Muslims from wearing those commodities. And then we also have the only, I think, perhaps high profile execution that we have documented is of a non-Muslim who actually wears the wrong color boots. And that's also an 18th century case. And we have really this kind of idea that your comportment of your body, the clothing you're wearing, the way you're carrying yourself publicly starts to actually really matter. I mean, this is something that's not visible in a lot of the Ottoman historiography of the early modern period, that communities had ways.

Everyone had a special hat. Everyone had colors that they used, whatever, even not just Christians, but on very minute levels, like identity was expressed through appearance in a lot of ways. And I guess what you're saying, the larger research on fashion during this time, it's showing a convergence of a sort of urban, a culture of urban consumption that is eroding those boundaries that maybe society had you know essentially enforced by itself

with that convergence you see anxiety about the erasure of boundaries essentially is what you're saying true very true but is there something more to it than just fashion are people actually mixing in new ways during this period across these boundaries i I'm thinking on the other side, we have priests who are talking about women also, their fashions and their comportment is changing. And so it seems to me from both sides, you have a sort of a discursive hardening of boundaries that's happening in the 18th century. But I don't always have evidence from everyday life

in my sources about how people are commingling i mean i think people um maybe the conversion case also cases also show that you know boundaries are are sometimes quite flexible um and maybe that's producing anxiety um i mean let's talk about let's talk about aleppo though i. So for this particular article, you focus especially on Aleppo. Perhaps this is a point that can be generalized for other Ottoman cities of the time, a general urban culture, perhaps not. But when I think about some of the work on socioeconomic transformation in Ottoman cities during the late 19th and early 20th centuries,

including the work of Keith Wattenpah on Aleppo, you do see that with a socioeconomic change, namely the creation of an urban middle class, certain boundaries are transgressed, leading to some types of convergences, both in terms of appearance and lifestyle, but also some anxieties about that I'm wondering what's happening in Aleppo at this time there's

a much earlier period it's very fascinating to find these anxieties erupting I'm wondering what you make of that well I mean so I mentioned earlier that the 18th century is crucial for the Ottoman Empire sort of being absorbed into the global economy in a way that we see sort of rapid fire exchanges like with fashion and trends in the Ottoman Empire. And we have kind of a leisure consumption kind of, go ahead. Sure.

No, we have to keep in mind that Aleppo is a, it's like a port kind of in a way. It's a mercantile center. It's not necessarily inland city in that regard because it's tied to alexandria so it's so yeah it's um aleppo is affected by that pattern and of course the the city's expanding but also power we know also is being concentrated more in the provinces among these you know sort of elites in the provinces, especially in the 18th century and afterwards. So that's also important. There's this other factor that explains why also Christians

would be concerned, and maybe even like the idea of reifying boundaries between communities at this time, because they're in competition with the Catholics, which is emerging as a force in the 18th century. In Aleppo, especially. In Aleppo. So there's this competition as the Catholics, which is emerging as a force in the 18th century. In Aleppo, especially. In Aleppo. So there's this competition as the Catholics are poaching off the Orthodox Christians to sort of retain boundaries around communities is very important. And so all of those things kind of converge together to produce factors that would make not only Muslims but also Christians amenable to the idea of boundary making. And of course, we know too from earlier scholarship that the Millett system is forged in this period of time, right? So rather than being an earlier phenomenon. So all of that

kind of comes together, making the 18 18th century helping explain why perhaps these cases would emerge in the 18th century i mean yeah we might not be able to explain it just through this case but you know this is relatively early compared to a lot of the discussion you just mentioned it's almost like you can see it taking shape in a little slightly earlier period through these like microcosmsms of urban space, urban spaces that blend the public and the private, such as the bathhouse, I think that it does elicit some questions

about those very tensions that would become much more pronounced during the late Ottoman period. Right, and what this study taught me, actually, was that perhaps the 18th century is really where we should be looking for incipient modernity and the sort of creeping in of modern thinking. And I'm not saying that I had the silver bullet here, but that some of these cases are showing a new model of thinking about separation and identity that I think are, in some ways, I don't want to say modern, but they're sort of veering in that direction in the sense that there's a kind of disciplining that's going on in these cases of separation and sort of monitoring. And it's certainly not a panopticon, but it's a sort of an indigenous form of surveillance that the guilds have always been a part of that.

That's perhaps what connects this work to my earlier work is the surveillance culture and the fact that it's very localized. And so you don't need the Ottoman state to kind of come in and demand these things when you have the guilds and the court sort of do that work. You're talking about it from the ground up, essentially, how this disciplining force is constructed, right? Yeah, and I mean, the Ottoman edicts surely help, because we know that this is something the empire was concerned with, because there were numerous sultanic edicts about these issues, but clothing and among other things. Well, at least it's a very thought-provoking piece of research.

Reading it as somebody who worked more on the 19th and 20th centuries, as is often the case when I read about 18th or 17th century, I start to realize that a lot of things that seemed novel in later periods actually used to happen before in the past. Imagine that. And so it's, I mean, this discussion of the bathhouses really would be very informative for the study of these urban spaces in later periods as well. And I want to thank you for coming and presenting that research on the podcast today. Thank you for having me. Now, for those who want to check out the full article published in IJMIS, we've got the

bibliographical information on our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com, as well as a short reading list on the topic, the publications of Professor Elis Samajian, as well as some other important background reading. That's a space to leave your comments and questions and get in touch with the Ottoman History Podcast community, now well over 20,000 followers and hopefully still growing. We want to invite you to leave your comments and questions. Let's get a little discussion going on the Facebook group. There's nothing wrong with doing that. And always stay tuned to find out about our other episodes

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