Quotes
Ayverdi states that the center of
gravity of the sixteenth- and sevententh-century Istanbul population was situated around the large and central Bayazit complex and that the density of
settlement decreased as one moved westwards.
In the Muslim mahalles of pre-nineteenth-century Istanbul, the central figure
of the neighborhood community was the religious leader of the local mosque,
the imam. He was indeed an influential man and, at times, a local potentate
of sorts. Certainly not because of the meager powers given him within the
administrative setup of towns in the central Ottoman lands but rather, as we
shall see in greater detail in the case of the Kasap İlyas mahalle, simply
because he was often relatively well-off—if not outright wealthy. Besides, his
legal position as trustee of a number of pious foundations put him in command of a nonnegligible amount of local economic resources.
Unlike the mahalle, the semts never were legal administrative units. The
mahalle, however, was always both a basic urban administrative unit and a
social and economic entity. However, these two meanings never completely
overlapped. The centrally determined administrative network of Ottoman
Istanbul and the web of local identities did not necessarily coincide. This was
so in the inceptive fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as well as in the “modernizing” nineteenth. The perception of the urban population regarding their
environment and their self-definition in relation to their immediate surrounding
was always more important than the religious/administrative matrix imposed
upon the cityscape for purposes of control or tax collection.
The traditional mahalles of Istanbul were generally very mixed in terms
of wealth, social class, and status. Residential patterns usually ran along lines of ethnicity and religion. However, ethnically and/or religiously mixed mahalles
were not infrequent either. Recent studies have tended to show that even in
the early periods of Ottoman rule, ethnic and religious identities did not
necessarily exhaust the definition of a mahalle. The notion of the absolute
homogeneity of the Islamic or Middle Eastern town quarter regarding its
social composition and the idea that these neighborhoods were exclusively
defined by religious, ethnic, class, or occupational affiliation have also seriously been challenged by recent studies on Ottoman cities, especially in the
empire’s Arab provinces.
Sayfa 5Kitabı okuyor
Avrupalıların elit aileleri varsa bizimde elit imamlarımız var
The flexibility of the process of appointment sometimes created real
dynasties of imams officiating in the same local mosque and sons often succeeded fathers as leaders of small Istanbulite local communities. Although the
appointment procedure for imams in republican Turkey has greatly changed—the imams are nowadays no more than ordinary government officials and
their appointment procedure obeys the rules that apply to all civil servants—
even in the present-day Kasap İlyas mahalle, a father and his son have been
the officiating imams of the mosque since 1970. Local dynasties of imams
may therefore have survived to a certain extent.
The mahalles were well entrenched as basic communities at the local level
and played key roles in shaping local identities and solidarities. This solidarity
entailed a particular modus vivendi, plus some sort of collective defense, as
well as various mechanisms of mutual control and surveillance, many of them
designed for regulating and monitoring public morality. In many mahalles
collective social life was real, durable, and strong. In many of them, for
instance, self-appointed bands of youths would act as militias to defend the
mahalle’s “honor” from outside “agressions.” In others, there were, in the
nineteenth century, self-organized amateur “fire-brigades” who took charge
of the extinction of real and of the prevention of potential fires. These young
mens’ brotherhood type of groups (tulumbacı) also took upon themselves the
task of defending the honor and reputation of the locals.
Sayfa 4Kitabı okuyor
The case of a “new” mahalle, just next to Kasap İlyas is a good example
of an attempted but aborted neighborhood. Its existence is documented as far
back as the second quarter of the sixteenth century, and it seems to have then
occupied an area around the Davud Paœa gate. It was at that time called a
“new mahalle, adjacent to Kasap İlyas,” probably because it did not yet have
a mosque of its own from which to derive a name. In the 1630s, however,
Bekir Paœa, one of the defterdars28 to Sultan Murad IV, built a two-story
wooden mosque on the seaside just outside the ramparts, endowed it, and
appointed an imam and a muezzin to officiate in it. With a number of people
already living in the area, and a newly established and endowed mosque, the
new neighborhood was thus set to acquire its independence from Kasap İlyas.