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Losing Istanbul: Arab-Ottoman Imperialists and the End of Empire
Losing Istanbul offers an intimate history of empire, following the rise and fall of a generation of Arab-Ottoman imperialists living in Istanbul. Mostafa Minawi shows how these men and women negotiated their loyalties and guarded their privileges through a microhistorical study of the changing social, political, and cultural currents between 1878 and the First World War. He narrates lives lived in these turbulent times--the joys and fears, triumphs and losses, pride and prejudices--while focusing on the complex dynamics of ethnicity and race in an increasingly Turco-centric imperial capital.
Drawing on archival records, newspaper articles, travelogues, personal letters, diaries, photos, and interviews, Minawi shows how the loyalties of these imperialists were questioned and their ethnic identification weaponized. As the once diverse empire comes to an end, they are forced to give up their home in the imperial capital. An alternative history of the last four decades of the Ottoman Empire, Losing Istanbul frames global pivotal events through the experiences of Arab-Ottoman imperial loyalists who called Istanbul home, on the eve of a vanishing imperial world order.
Drawing on archival records, newspaper articles, travelogues, personal letters, diaries, photos, and interviews, Minawi shows how the loyalties of these imperialists were questioned and their ethnic identification weaponized. As the once diverse empire comes to an end, they are forced to give up their home in the imperial capital. An alternative history of the last four decades of the Ottoman Empire, Losing Istanbul frames global pivotal events through the experiences of Arab-Ottoman imperial loyalists who called Istanbul home, on the eve of a vanishing imperial world order.
- GenresHistory
326 pages, Paperback
Published December 6, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 14, 2024
Mostafa Minawi’s book is brilliant and the Turkish translation is mostly very good!
January 12, 2025
A microhistory of the last generation of Arab-Ottoman imperialists incarnated by the Azmzade family, a dynasty of provincial Syrians with a long history of service to the Ottoman Empire. The book follows two of their scions, Shafiq and Sadik, born in the Tanzimat period and active in the Hamidian and CUP periods. This was the last generation of pre-nation-state Arabs, when a provincial notable could be born in Damascus, educated in Beirut and employed in Istanbul as the state bureaucrat of an empire that ruled from Sarajevo to Basra and Kars to Yemen. For these people, Ottomanism was very real and represented a pathway to participation in a common state that they were very invested in the success of, because its success was also their success.
The book's focus is on how Arab-Ottomans experienced, participated in and were eventually disappointed (or ruined) by imperial politics in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire, with a strong focus on their lives in Istanbul, then a cosmopolitain imperial center that brought together Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Turks, Arabs, Circassians and an array of transnational imperial elites. Particular highlights:
- It can't be understated how transnational the upper class really was. Shafiq and Sadik spoke Turkish, Arabic, French, German & English and rubbed shoulders with British dignitaries, Russian royals, Bulgarian princes, Abyssians, Senussi sheikhs, Somalis, etc. Western imperial culture was partly adopted, wholly used, and translated. A family in Istanbul's imperial quarter had more in common than not with a Victorian household of Imperial bureaucrats.
- An ardent loyalist of the empire, Sadik (like the vast majority of Ottoman elites) saw no contradiction at all between the advancement of his family and the advancement of the empire. He routinely used state offices to the advantage of the Azmzades, putting his relatives in state offices, leveraging imperial courts and the sultan-caliph's favor for appointments, land disputes, etc. Their success was considered the empire's success.
- For Arab-Ottomans, Ottomanism was a lived reality and something they were truly invested in. Sadik in particular was so committed that he went to great pains to avoid mention of his own ethnicity as an Arab (worth noting that Arap, the Turkish word for Arab, was straight up a racial slur for Black people also used as an insult by Turks against non-Black Arabs), and negotiated a liminal space where he was simultaneously a minority in the Ottoman empire where Turks were privileged, as well as a larger member of a transnational colonial elite. One of the more revealing episodes are his expeditions to Abyssinia and Libya, where despite having more in common with the colonized than the colonizers on ethno-cultural basis, he sets himself apart and behaves & believes in himself as a "White Muslim". Imperialism was a universal, transnational upper class, even though the OE was hard done by Western imperial powers.
- Arab-Ottomans navigated an empire where ethnoracial and linguistic differentation was on the rise and struggled both against Turkish chauvinism as well as aspersions of disloyalty despite long service to the empire. The Ottoman Empire was a prism where an array of identifications prevailed. Some claimed a Muslim identitarianism, others a Turkish nationalism, and others still committed to a multiethnic, multilingual and multi-confessionary imperial ideology not unlike America today or Austria-Hungary at the time. This is particularly strong in the post-Young Turk Revolution years, when Arab-Ottoman deputies in the parliament struggled against what they saw was Turkish nationalist attempting to stamp out Arabs from the state's fabric with language policies that enshrined Turkish, and accusations that advocation for the rights of Arabs (and other minorities) was tantamount to treason.
It's an incredibly interesting book and I really recommend it. I think a lot of people lose sight of the Ottoman Empire as a place that people actually lived in and experienced, instead of a zombie of eternal decline. It meant a great deal to a great many people. I think if I had one quibble with the book it's that the WW1 parts are quite skimpy. We're left on the note that the Azmzades fell afoul of CUP paranoia and purges that targeted Arab-Ottomans accused of disloyalty to the empire despite Arabs forming 1/3 of the army and dying in droves in every front to protect the empire, their roles written out by nationalist historiographies from Turkey on the one side that extolled Turkish nationalist narratives of the OE as a precursor to the Kemalist state & Arab nationalist narratives on the other that painted the OE as an oppressor of Arabs, all to justify the nation-states that permanently separated families like the Azmzades who after WW1 found themselves split between four different countries.
The book's focus is on how Arab-Ottomans experienced, participated in and were eventually disappointed (or ruined) by imperial politics in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire, with a strong focus on their lives in Istanbul, then a cosmopolitain imperial center that brought together Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Turks, Arabs, Circassians and an array of transnational imperial elites. Particular highlights:
- It can't be understated how transnational the upper class really was. Shafiq and Sadik spoke Turkish, Arabic, French, German & English and rubbed shoulders with British dignitaries, Russian royals, Bulgarian princes, Abyssians, Senussi sheikhs, Somalis, etc. Western imperial culture was partly adopted, wholly used, and translated. A family in Istanbul's imperial quarter had more in common than not with a Victorian household of Imperial bureaucrats.
- An ardent loyalist of the empire, Sadik (like the vast majority of Ottoman elites) saw no contradiction at all between the advancement of his family and the advancement of the empire. He routinely used state offices to the advantage of the Azmzades, putting his relatives in state offices, leveraging imperial courts and the sultan-caliph's favor for appointments, land disputes, etc. Their success was considered the empire's success.
- For Arab-Ottomans, Ottomanism was a lived reality and something they were truly invested in. Sadik in particular was so committed that he went to great pains to avoid mention of his own ethnicity as an Arab (worth noting that Arap, the Turkish word for Arab, was straight up a racial slur for Black people also used as an insult by Turks against non-Black Arabs), and negotiated a liminal space where he was simultaneously a minority in the Ottoman empire where Turks were privileged, as well as a larger member of a transnational colonial elite. One of the more revealing episodes are his expeditions to Abyssinia and Libya, where despite having more in common with the colonized than the colonizers on ethno-cultural basis, he sets himself apart and behaves & believes in himself as a "White Muslim". Imperialism was a universal, transnational upper class, even though the OE was hard done by Western imperial powers.
- Arab-Ottomans navigated an empire where ethnoracial and linguistic differentation was on the rise and struggled both against Turkish chauvinism as well as aspersions of disloyalty despite long service to the empire. The Ottoman Empire was a prism where an array of identifications prevailed. Some claimed a Muslim identitarianism, others a Turkish nationalism, and others still committed to a multiethnic, multilingual and multi-confessionary imperial ideology not unlike America today or Austria-Hungary at the time. This is particularly strong in the post-Young Turk Revolution years, when Arab-Ottoman deputies in the parliament struggled against what they saw was Turkish nationalist attempting to stamp out Arabs from the state's fabric with language policies that enshrined Turkish, and accusations that advocation for the rights of Arabs (and other minorities) was tantamount to treason.
It's an incredibly interesting book and I really recommend it. I think a lot of people lose sight of the Ottoman Empire as a place that people actually lived in and experienced, instead of a zombie of eternal decline. It meant a great deal to a great many people. I think if I had one quibble with the book it's that the WW1 parts are quite skimpy. We're left on the note that the Azmzades fell afoul of CUP paranoia and purges that targeted Arab-Ottomans accused of disloyalty to the empire despite Arabs forming 1/3 of the army and dying in droves in every front to protect the empire, their roles written out by nationalist historiographies from Turkey on the one side that extolled Turkish nationalist narratives of the OE as a precursor to the Kemalist state & Arab nationalist narratives on the other that painted the OE as an oppressor of Arabs, all to justify the nation-states that permanently separated families like the Azmzades who after WW1 found themselves split between four different countries.
January 25, 2026
Kitabı İngilizcesinden okuyarak bitirebildim. Türkçesini yarıda bıraktım, çevirisi sağ olsun...
September 22, 2025
Not only was the story of this elite Arab-Ottoman family fascinating in and of itself, but it offers a nuanced perspective on Arab experiences during the last years of the Ottoman Empire, rebutting both the Arab nationalist view of Arabs as oppressed colonial subjects and the Turkish nationalist view of Arabs as backstabbers. My one objection is that we didn’t get a full picture of why one of the family’s most notable members was executed by the Ottoman governor of Greater Syria.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews