Friday sermons and the complexities of standardization in the late Ottoman Empire

Abstract

This study aims to examine the nature and success of Ottoman modernization in the realm of religious practice by studying the central state’s attempts to standardize Friday sermons, or the hutbe. This study claims that the hutbe was a site for the negotiation of local and central power, both separately and in relationship to one another. Changes in the form, content, and medium of the hutbe in the late nineteenth century reveal that the central state was not the only actor that influenced the hutbe. Local populations and power holders, administrators, and clerics played a crucial role in determining the appointment of the preachers and the content of the hutbe, which in practice did not always serve state interests. The hutbe was not always a venue for state propaganda; it was also a venue in which local demands, discontents, and dissatisfactions were expressed in different ways. In other words, the process of standardization of religious practices and beliefs was not a top-down, state-centric development in which local actors were passive receptors. The main purpose of the study is to demonstrate the complexities, contingencies, and mediations in the standardization and centralization policies of the empire throughout the late nineteenth century.