Once we realize the intensity of story listening and the political content many coffeehouse stories conveyed, it becomes easier to understand how this tradition helped sustain a highly politicized community. Especially for the soldiers in the Sultan\u2019s army (called janissaries), story listening helped to forge a counter-hegemonic identity that emphasized military prowess, comradeship, and non-orthodox religious identification.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
History of Imagination?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Academic discussions of the imagination have gained new momentum over the last two decades, driven by several current developments, including the overflow of commodified virtual images and the deliberate use of \u2018fake news\u2019 and conspiracy theories. The environmental crisis, too, contributes to this growing interest. In his Great Derangement <\/em>(2016), Amitav Ghosh writes that the climate crisis is also \u201ca crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.\u201d During the nineteenth century, Ghosh argues, our \u201cnarrative imagination\u201d has been shaped and narrowed by a set of literary conventions that now curtail our ability to conceptualize the crisis and its consequences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The history of cognition seeks to explain, in the words of Ayelet Even Ezra, \u201cnot only what<\/em> people have thought, but also how<\/em> they were thinking.\u201d Unlike other disciplines that investigate cognitive processes, historians of cognition are interested in thought not as an abstraction (as usually discussed by philosophers) or in the quantitative sense (as studies by neuroscientists) but as it is operationalized in \u201creal life.\u201d Here, cognitive processes are always embodied; they always unfold in specific times and environments and are shaped by social class, gender, and religious affiliation, to name a few historically determined variables. Furthermore, since certain cognitive skills improve through training and since access to such training is determined by social circumstances, developing such skills, too, is a historical variable rather than a universal one. Finally, thinking processes do not take place only in our heads. The cognitive processes unfold between the inside and the outside through sketching, doodling, and writing, in particular, material environments using specific \u201cthinking aids\u201d from pencils to computers. Architects, designers, authors, students, and engineers do not imagine in their minds before they sketch or write; rather, they imagine through sketching, just like historians think through writing. Thinking aids influence and change the way we think, and they, too, change over time and are not accessible to all. Thought patterns, then, have a history. Not only did people in the past understand imagination differently, they imagined differently. Looking at early 19th<\/sup>-century Istanbul coffeehouses may help to demonstrate this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Coffeehouses of the Imagination<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Starting in the late 18th<\/sup> century, the Ottoman sultans led a reform project to centralize power and create a more effective state mechanism. As part of this project, the palace tightened its supervision over socially, religiously, and politically unruly groups. The reforms comprised administration, taxation, and military amendments, including the establishment of a new army alongside the old janissary corps. These measures were met with stubborn opposition, particularly from the janissaries, who feared the new army would replace them. In addition, the taxation imposed by the government to finance the reforms caused great resentment among the lower classes, to which most of the janissary soldiers belonged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Moreover, the janissaries were affiliated with the Bektashi Sufi order, an unorthodox order with strong Shiite influences that did not observe some of the basic commandments and prohibitions of orthodox Sunni Islam. The Bektashis venerate Ali Ibn Abi-Talib, the Prophet\u2019s cousin and son-in-law, who is considered the father of the mystical, \u201cinternal\u201d dimension of Islam and, in the eyes of the Shiites, the true and legitimate successor of Mohammad. In the first half of the 19th<\/sup> century, as the Ottoman government centralized and the ruling elite became more orthodox, the Bekta\u015fsi grew even more suspicious than before, adding a religious dimension to the political and social tension between the janissaries and the ruling elite. Coffeehouses were the most important gathering and recreation sites for the janissaries and other groups from Istanbul\u2019s lower classes. To illustrate the magnitude, during the 1790s, there were 1,654 coffeehouses in Istanbul, a city with a population of between 300-400,000 at the time. According to one estimate, based on the data of the Ottoman government itself, one of every eight shops in Istanbul was a coffeehouse. In the 1840s, the number of coffeehouses reached 2,500.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Listening to stories was the most common leisure evening activity in the coffeehouses. The stories were told by professional storytellers or amateurs who read manuscripts borrowed for a modest sum from the stalls of booksellers or bookbinders. Many hundreds of such copies survived, bearing thousands of comments left by readers and listeners. These give us firsthand knowledge of how people reacted to the various stories. In addition to these comments, dozens of testimonies from European travelers may also teach us about the nature of these group readings and their intensity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The repertoire of texts read in the cafes was relatively broad. It sometimes included chronicles and folk biographies of well-known figures from Islamic history. More common were stories, some very old, for example, Arabian Nights<\/em>, the stories of Kalila and Dimna<\/em>, and Farhad and Shirin<\/em>, or variations on these. There were also new, more realistic stories, many of which took place in the streets of Istanbul. Adventures of heroic warriors were particularly well-loved. These are the focus of this article.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Suspense <\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n What, then, characterized the experience of listening to stories in the janissary coffeehouses? One notable characteristic was the high level of concentration. Many travelers were surprised by the prevailing quiet and the deep immersion of the listeners during readings. For example, the Irish clergyman and physician Robert Walsh (1772\u20131852), who spent five years in Istanbul during the 1820s, noted that the people at the coffeehouse \u201csat silent like an audience in a theatre.\u201d The traveler-geologist John Auldjo (1805-1886), who visited Istanbul in 1833, described the \u201cprofound silence\u201d in the coffeehouse as the storyteller was getting ready to speak. Everyone was \u201cmost anxious to catch every word that fell from his lips.\u201d Many others noted the close listening, and this is no small matter. According to Elif Sezer Ayd\u0131nl\u0131, readings in the coffeehouses during the period in question typically lasted between an hour and a half to four hours or even longer. Nowadays, it is hard to imagine a few dozen adults maintaining such a high level of attention and involvement while listening to a story over several hours. Most of them would likely be playing with their cellphones, sharing their boredom with friends and followers on social media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Listeners in the coffeehouses were not only deeply immersed but actively involved. This is the second characteristic that is worth emphasizing. The listeners commented on the plotline, the characters, and the delivery, often leading to lively discussions. However, this was not simply a matter of detached intellectual involvement. Identification with the protagonists of the narrative reached such levels that listeners would often cheer them on, pray for their success, and curse at their adversaries. It was common for storytellers to build suspense and, just when their audience was completely immersed, to abruptly break off, leaving their audience in suspense, much like in today\u2019s television series.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is worth noting that the same technique was employed by Scheherazade in Arabian Nights<\/em> (a favorite in Ottoman coffeehouses) to keep King Shariyar from killing her. While storytellers\u2019 lives did not hinge on ending their tales at the height of tension, their livelihood certainly did. For instance, the complete cycle of the heroic story of Eb\u00fc M\u00fcslim was sometimes spread over as many as 27 nights. Keeping the suspense intact, therefore, held a clear economic incentive for coffeehouse owners and storytellers alike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Scottish physician Alexander Russel noted that stories were \u201cheard with great attention\u201d and often, \u201cwhen the expectation of the audience is raised to the highest pitch,\u201d the storyteller leaves abruptly and \u201cmakes an escape from the room, leaving both his heroine and his audience, in the utmost embarrassment.\u201d People were so caught up in the story that they sometimes tried to block the storyteller\u2019s way and prevent him from leaving. If they failed, they would begin to dispute the \u201ccharacter of the drama, or the event of the unfinished adventure. The controversy by degrees becomes serious and opposite opinions are maintained with no less warmth, than if the fate of the city depended on the decision.\u201d The Scottish traveler Donald Campbell also witnessed such a scene and found it utterly ridiculous. He attributes the seriousness with which the listeners engaged in the discussion to the irrationality of \u201cOrientals.\u201d It was his French friend, a resident of Istanbul, who finally convinced him that this heated debate was a kind of literary criticism in real-time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These impressions, documenting attentive listening and deep emotional involvement, are also confirmed by the thousands of notes and scribbles left by readers and listeners on the margins of these manuscripts over decades of group readings. Here, too, we find cursing of the villains, praise for the heroes, prayers for their success, and the occasional comment on the level of the stories or the storytellers. Some notes record arguments that deteriorated into actual brawls, with different groups of listeners supporting different protagonists in the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Practicing Imagination<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The intense immersion and emotional involvement described in the aforementioned accounts is what literary scholars call \u201ctransport\u201d or \u201ctransportation,\u201d that is, the experience of losing awareness of the surroundings as one becomes absorbed in a story. The intensity of the experience is somewhat surprising, given the relative paucity of human imagination. Although we tend to ascribe great powers to the imagination, it is, in fact, inferior in its vivacity and vitality to our perception. Neuroscientist Joel Pearson suggests that mental imaging is \u201clike a weak form of perception.\u201d However, a story can guide our weak imagination and activate it so effectively that it can guide our relatively impoverished imagination to a level approaching actual perception. Of special interest here is the discovery of \u201cmirror neurons,\u201d Namely, brain cells that fire not only when we perform an action but also when we observe somebody else performing it or even when the action is merely described to us. In coffeehouse readings, the collective experience probably intensified this sense of identification. It was as if, in a cinema without a screen, all listeners shared the story. They traversed the same landscapes, going through the same epic adventures, sharing the suspense, the contempt for the villains, and admiration for the heroes as a group. The unwritten protocols of the coffeehouse performance encouraged listeners\u2019 engagement, which made the experience even more powerful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Several studies suggest that specific mental imagery processes are trainable, leading to enhanced performance in terms of vividness, controllability, detail resolution, and other parameters. It has also been suggested that practicing imagination can be achieved through engagement with fiction. This hypothesis is partly supported by neuroscience research. For example, a study by Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus and colleagues showed that listening to a story (without visual input) is associated with increased brain activation of visual attention networks compared to watching videos. Given the strong reactions of coffeehouse clients, there is reason to believe that they imagined the stories narrated to them with great intensity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Co-Imagining<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Against the background of growing tensions between the palace and the janissaries, the power of co-imagining and the well-trained imagination of coffeehouse story listeners was harnessed to sustain a non-orthodox group identity, foster solidarity, and nourish a counter-hegemonic sentiment among the regiments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Illustrations and doodles left by listeners in the margins of the manuscripts reveal how they imagined the main characters in the stories, including their clothes, weapons, and other details. These illustrations indicate that they often imagined the story\u2019s heroes in their own image. Some sketches portray the story’s protagonist in customary janissary attire and carrying typical janissary weapons. The long and pointed mustache, the janissaries\u2019 most distinctive feature, adorns the figures of these fictional warriors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not only did the listeners imagine the heroes of the stories in their own image, they saw themselves as the descendants of those heroic figures who fought against both infidels and oppressive Muslim rulers. I will focus on one example: Within a passage detailing the hero and his men departing for battle, someone wrote the following poem:<\/p>\n\n\n\n We are the sons of Ali in the district of this period<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n We are the lowest of his lowest slaves, the lowest.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Curse on the evil of Marwan and Yezid<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n We are the biggest of their biggest enemies, th<\/em>e biggest.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n We sacrificed head and soul for the path of love<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n We are the nourishers of his lineage, the nourishers<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n In the context of the late 1830s, when the court was promoting strict orthodoxy as part of its reform agenda, announcing such intense devotion to Ali would have been highly subversive. Other Bekta\u015fi hymns and formulas can be found here and there, but many more appear to have been deliberately erased. Deep identification with the house of Ali is evident in many other notes. For instance, many of the weapons illustrated on the margins of the manuscripts bear inscriptions praising Ali, such as the popular phrase: \u201cThere is no hero but Ali; there is no sword but du al-Faqar [his famous sword].\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In conclusion, amidst the increasing tension between the palace, the reformists, and the orthodox elite on the one hand, and the Bekhtashi janissaries and impoverished strata of Istanbul on the other, coffeehouse story listening transcended mere escapism or retreat into the realm of imagination. If a picture is worth a thousand words, mental images were nearly as valuable, especially in a world where figurative representation was rare. The power of co-imagining to evoke robust emotional responses made it a particularly potent tool for sustaining a non-orthodox group identity, fostering solidarity, and nourishing a counter-hegemonic sentiment among the regiments. They were not only warriors carrying on the legacy of generations of Muslim fighters but also loyal adherents to a distinct Shiite-influenced tradition of the Bektashis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The janissary distinct and counter-hegemonic identity found expression in the janissaries’ uprisings of the early 19th<\/sup> century and their active involvement in politics. In short, reality and imagination are not opposing categories; rather, they are two interrelated dimensions, the interaction of which forms human existence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n *This article is based on a project supported by the Israel Science Foundation, grant no. 997\/22<\/p>\n\n\n\n Translation from Hebrew: Zoe Jordan<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gramer proofreading: Noa Shuval<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The term \u201cOriental imagination,\u201d which appeared in Europe around the beginning of the early modern period, became a distinct marker of Oriental otherness during the Enlightenment. Various European philosophers held<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/maarav.org.il\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/\u05e2\u05d5\u05e1\u05de\u05df.png\")
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