Ottoman coffeehouse
These coffeehouses, started in the mid-sixteenth century, brought together citizens across society for educational, social, and political activity as well as general information exchange.
[citation needed] The activity of coffee-drinking and coffeehouses originated in Arabia, and it moved to Egypt then to Persia then to the Ottoman Empire during the sixteenth century.
[7] Eminegül Karababa and Guliz Ger note that "rather than merely providing a place to drink coffee, the coffeehouse created a pleasant site for patrons to interact in".
Ottoman coffeehouses allowed the members of lower society to receive informal education, instruction that was traditionally provided by universities and churches.
Poets, politicians, scholars, dervishes, and, later, janissaries could meet in groups with similar interests to express their passions and thoughts.
Jean de Thévenot, a French traveler in the Middle East, noted that men of all occupations, religions, or statuses could frequent coffeehouses.
[6] Thévenot recognized the “heterogeneity of coffeehouse clientele,” citing “socio-professional and confessional distinctions.”[14] The main frequenters were artisans, shopkeepers, yet merchants from foreign countries like England, Russia, France, and Venice constituted the second largest group.
[14] Due to increased communication and interaction between distinct people, “mimetic processes” were developed in politics, art, and, most importantly, insurrection.
Bureaucrats distributed information to military officers, just as writers exchanged works with poets; a truly dialectical process was shaping rich Ottoman culture.
[15] The warriors expressed strong loyalty to their individual orta and the coffeehouse provided the means to become increasingly isolated from the Ottoman authorities as well as connected to undercover networks for assassinations, gossip, and wealth.
During the late Ottoman Empire, these units were carefully monitored for their overreaching influence and power in society, specifically by royal and other authorities.
While seemingly harmless, the coffeehouses extended that power into civil society, allowing them to engage with others in private, secluded spaces.
[14] The elite warriors participated in devlet sohbeti, a term meaning “state talk.”[16] Many of these discussions spread rumors or private information amongst a highly intelligent and capable group.
As the owners as well as clients of these establishments, the Janissaries controlled the flow of verbal communication and information in a time of low literacy rates.
[4] But because coffeehouses were key locations for discourse and information exchange, the majority of spy reports included these types of conversations.
[9] The main objective of the spies was to collect public opinion, including everything from neighborhood gossip to planned political riots.
Instead, the reports constituted a form of micro surveillance where the government could quickly gather a range of public opinion on different topics.
[17] Nacîmâ, for example, pictures a seedy coffeehouses at the port of Istanbul patronized, he claims, by unsavory types, thieves and runaway slaves, hangmen and the occasional debt collector.
[18] And writing later, in the seventeenth century, one Ottoman historian complained that the ‘lowest’ sort of person spent the whole day in coffeehouses, which provided the setting for immoral and seditious behavior.
[17] Muslim legal scholars tended to worry about places where the lower orders congregate, and–while there were certainly a rough side and unsavory types –the reality of the normal coffeehouse was tamer than its reputation.
[23] While men were the sole patrons of coffeehouses in the Ottoman Empire, these institutions were not created to entrench gender or space-based divisions.
Open late into the night, men would leave the home, which allowed women to establish a space for their own community.
Specific references to the Qur’an cite this “gaze” and ask followers to demonstrate “modesty.”[25] It challenged the highly regarded ideal of private life.
Cyrus Hamlin, who was president of the college until 1877 wrote: "Steam made Constantinople a commercial city and brought civilization, the arts and the vices of the West and East together in the Ottoman capital".
He felt values were Christian rather than "Western" and both he and his successor George Washburn supported temperance in the Ottoman Empire.
According to Mary Neuberger, "This inculcation of the Protestant work ethic was part of a more general assault on Balkan drunkenness and idleness."
Some authors have written that "when a young man gazed through the window of a coffeehouse, he was aspriring to adulthood, and his admission to the institution was a communally recognized transition to adult life".
