Original version
Contemporary Levant. 2020, 5 (1), 24-32, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/20581831.2020.1710668
Abstract
This article proposes the concept of order as a major chronotope of Ottoman political writing which has shaped temporal projections such as decline and renewal from the seventeenth century onwards. In chronological order, I discuss the seventeenth-century debates on breakdown of social order and emergence of the sense of decline, and the eighteenth-century literature on Khaldunian concept of nomadic versus sedentary forms of habitation and spatiality of the debates over moral degeneration. The urban space of Istanbul, both material and abstract, as a political and social setting also figures prominently in these discussions and shapes Ottoman perceptions of the European city. Through a discussion of the chronotope of order I also challenge pervasive narratives of Westernisation and progress in favour of indigenous cyclical narratives of restoration and renewal.