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As Night Falls: Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Cities after Dark Avner Wishnitzer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021). Pp. 376. £29.99 hardback. ISBN: 9781108832144
Avner Wishnitzer's excellent book brings illumination to a subject very little studied for the Middle Eastern world, and that is the night. Covering the long 18th century stretching from 1703 to the 1820s and focusing almost exclusively on Istanbul, with some discussion of Jerusalem, the book examines the impact of darkness on individuals, the fear and insecurity it induced and the dangers it conjured up, both real and imagined. It considers the role of the night in spiritual illumination, and what the night meant for the state, presenting it with both an obscurity it could not control and a murky world of illegal trade from which it benefited, as well as a canvas for the projection of power and piety, a backdrop whose illumination brought with it legitimation of sultanic power. The night also presented a world of illicit entertainment, where nighttime offered concealment and a cover for activities not acceptable in the light of day.
For many people in the Ottoman empire in the 18th century, night represented the time to withdraw, to be locked away in their homes and definitely not out and about on the streets. It was, to use Wishnitzer's phrase, a “disquieting” time. The night robbed people of their ability to see, and the deep darkness into which Istanbul, like other early modern cities, was plunged with the setting of the sun undermined people's sense of control, leaving them to rely largely or solely on their sense of hearing to understand and interpret what was going on around them. It is this “aural texture of the night” (17) that Wishnitzer sets out to reconstruct in the first section of his book.
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