Dina Khoury

Associate Professor of History and International Affairs, George Washington University

Khoury has published on the Iraqi provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the early modern period. Her research has focused on the social history and political culture of the Ottoman provinces with particular emphasis on urban rebellions and Islamic reform agendas. Her current research interests include the relationship of memory to identity and the impact of violence on Middle Eastern societies.

The Ottoman Effect and the Frontiers of Empire: Imaginings of Tribe and Sect in the Nineteenth Century

Most of my presentation will focus on the ambiguities and tensions in the construction of categories of sect and tribe in the literature produced by Ottoman officials and the literati of southern Iraq between the 1840s and early 1900s. My argument will trace the creation of a modern imperial effect, very much in the vein of Timothy Mitchell’s argument about the need to understand the state‘s effect (its construction of its own narrative and its presence as a solid and real entity) as constitutive of the formation of the state ( in my case Empire). So the main issue becomes, how modernizing Ottoman functionaries and the local literati begin reconfiguring their own understanding of tribe and sect as a result of the Ottomans’ determination to render these more legible (less particular) and justify this legibility in terms of a modern form of Ottoman imperial knowledge. I will frame my discussion within the larger debates on the construction of difference, sectarianism, and tolerance that are now the staple of nineteenth century studies in the Ottoman field.