History of Art & Architecture
“Improve and reform them”: Vocational Boarding Schools and the Modernization of Three Late Ottoman Arab Cities
My dissertation focuses on vocational boarding schools in Baghdad, Damascus, and Beirut at the turn of the twentieth century. In response to an influx of war refugees on city streets across the Ottoman Empire, rulers and reformers alike sponsored the establishment of a new kind of school, known in Turkish as the “islahhane” (reform house) or “sanayi mektebi” (industrial school). Through classes in basic academics and handcraft ateliers, students were to be shaped into loyal, moral, and self-sufficient subjects. Reformers considered this school to be a tool for social transformation since it emptied public spaces of itinerant children and crime, promoted a modern, Islamic curriculum, and supported the debt-ridden economy. Standardization of the ıslahhane across the empire meant maintaining a constantly migrating network of teachers and students between each school and assimilating subjects into a shared Ottoman culture, all the while leaving flexibility for local needs and cultural norms.
I examine photographs and architectural plans of these schools in order to understand how architects combined modern school types with local Ottoman, Arab, and Islamic architectural cultures. I read Ottoman government correspondence, building deeds, and memoirs to visualize the experiences of reformers, school directors, teachers, and students in these institutions and how they interacted with questions of modernity and nationalism. This study demonstrates how Ottoman reformers’ ideas paralleled the anxieties of their counterparts worldwide regarding itinerant children, morality, sanitation, and urban order, thus integrating late Ottoman institutional architecture into a broader global nineteenth-century history of marginality.