During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the city of Beirut underwent dramatic transformations. A combination of state-imposed reforms, local efforts, and regional growth brought Beirut to the fore as the main port city in the Levant and as capital of its own vilayet in 1888. Its public image became one of the centerpieces of the centralizing efforts of the Tanzimat, particularly under Sultan Abdülhamit II (r. 1876–1909). This was reflected in an urban policy aimed at instilling the imperial presence in the details of everyday life, from the public square to the sewage system.Footnote ¹ The language of reform and modernity also found expression within an emerging intellectual group attempting to particularize and localize both European cultural impact and Ottoman reforms. Using the platforms provided by literary and philanthropic societies as well as newspapers and periodicals, various intellectuals tried to ground modern changes in their own realities and turn them into vehicles for social transformation.

From the 1880s on, domesticity increasingly became a central topic of discourse, structured by a number of interrelated issues that occupied Christian and Muslim intellectuals alike: the question of women's education and role in society, the location of the family in a societal order increasingly viewed as organic, the formulation of an “oriental” or “Syrian” identity, and the redefinition of tradition at a time of cultural and social upheaval. The body of literature that emerged around the topic indicates that the home signified something more than just a physical structure or a status symbol. It came to constitute a contentious site of struggle over defining the meaning of modernity and how Ottoman subjects were meant to live it.

The discourse of domesticity in Beirut paralleled similar discourses elsewhere in the region. Scholars have linked this development in Cairo, Istanbul, Tehran, and other places to the emergence of new social classes and changing conceptions of gender.Footnote ² On Ottoman Syria in particular, Akram Khater's work on Mount Lebanon ties the invention of “home” to discourses and practices of class and gender.Footnote ³ In his attention to material aspects of the home, Khater argues that the “central-hall house” typology was used as “testament to” and “indication of” the social standing of returning migrants from the Americas seeking to signify their middle-class identity and to distinguish themselves from their peasant surroundings.Footnote ⁴ This article makes material aspects of the home a central concern by specifically focusing on the category of taste (dhawq). Although signifying wealth and distinction is not a strictly modern phenomenon, the role that taste came to play in late Ottoman Beirut was linked to industrialized production, wider access to consumption, and advertising trends. In that sense, the home—including both its structure and its contents—not only signified a social standing but also played a role in recasting and articulating class differences.

I start by locating the Beirut home in its urban context and exploring the various principles of living embodied by the “central-hall house” typology. These principles are then linked to the discourse of domesticity, placing the latter in its regional context and investigating how it attempted to translate abstract notions of class, “oriental” difference, and civic duty into a daily praxis revolving around taste. This notion of “taste” worked to ground abstract concepts of modern order in everyday practice, to reconfigure the place of the woman at the heart of the nuclear family, and to articulate a middle-class culture distinguished from both the wealthier classes and ifranjī, or European, culture.

Taking taste as developed in intellectual circles to be representative of modern taste in general risks reproducing a discourse that marginalizes a large part of an emerging middle class as not yet modern and as failing, because of its difference, to integrate into the overall experience of modernity. Beirut's position as growing port city meant that more and more of the city's inhabitants were exposed to both imported and locally manufactured commodities. While one cannot speak of a Beiruti “middle class” in the sense of an organized class with a clearly defined set of common interests, turn of the century Beirut witnessed the emergence of a middle-class culture defined by economic position, education, and a lifestyle characterized by greater access to commodities. Intellectual advice in the press attempted to give form to this emerging middle class through, among other things, lifestyle advice privileging authenticity and moderation in consumption habits. Yet the tastes and preferences of such an idealized middle class constructed in the press cannot be assumed to be the tastes actually prevalent in Beirut. Using Beirut court records, advertisements, and trade reports, the last two sections thus reconstruct elements of a form of taste not presented in the intellectual corpus, one that privileged novelty and abundance over authenticity and moderation. Uncovering such taste is particularly important in the context of Beirut, where Ottoman historiography is dominated by intellectuals, merchants, and bureaucrats.Footnote ⁵

RECONSIDERING TASTE AND CLASS IN BEIRUT

Rather than take “the middle class” as an existing category, this article focuses on the process of its emergence. I argue that a new species of intellectuals, schooled both in European and local knowledge, attempted to reposition itself as the vanguard of an idealized middle class whose cultural habits were distinct from both the upper classes and what they perceived as European influences. Following Bourdieu's view of the intellectual class as the dominated segment of the upper class, the attempt by a group of intellectuals to define middle-class taste can be seen as a move toward recasting class difference by positioning itself as the dominating segment of an emerging middle class.Footnote ⁶ Holding cultural capital—that of taste and the ability to recognize and reproduce it—to be more relevant than economic capital to the construction of a modern everyday, several intellectuals writing in turn of the century Beirut saw domesticity as part of an idealized middle-class culture to which members of the emerging middle class should aspire. In this process of class repositioning, Muslim and Christian intellectuals in Beirut drew on existing vocabulary—the designation “those of middling means” (mutawassiṭū al-ḥāl)—to address their targeted audience, redefining the term to refer to a set of cultural practices instead of just an economic position.Footnote ⁷

Bringing class dynamics back into the picture minimizes the overemphasized sectarian dimension of late Ottoman culture, and of Beirut in particular, and allows for the exploration of cultural dimensions and relations that are otherwise obfuscated by the use of “sect” as an analytical category. The use of taste justifies this shift of emphasis because intellectuals of various sects shared a common cultural language, partially shaped by press debates and scientific societies, just as the inhabitants of Beirut shared the same commercial spaces and were exposed to the same consumer products.Footnote ⁸ Deemphasizing sect as an analytical category brings to the fore a cross-sectarian anxiety about the loss of “authenticity.” The choice of the periodicals al-Muqtataf, Thamarat al-Funun, al-Mahabba, and al-Hasnaʾ as sources relates to this concern, because they represent the most prominent approaches to domesticity circulating in Beirut at the time.Footnote ⁹ That is not to say that sectarian identity did not matter. As we shall see in the discussion of al-Mahabba and Thamarat al-Funun, there were differences both in content and language when it came to the way women's fashion was linked to their domestic duties. Rather than taking sectarian differences as a starting point, however, I have elected to indicate them where they arise in the course of this article.

HOME IN THE CITY

The formation of intellectual categories of domesticity paralleled a growing concern with beauty, hygiene, and order in the language of Ottoman urban reformers. As early as 1836, inspired by his diplomatic missions to Paris, Vienna, and London, the leading early Tanzimat statesman Mustafa Reşit Pasha advocated “scientific” principles and geometrical rules in the urban regeneration of the imperial capital.Footnote ¹⁰ The logic of the “straight line” was a powerful guiding principle for these changes. The increasing importance of wheeled traffic for the transportation of goods and passengers in the rapidly expanding cities of the empire necessitated the construction of straightened arteries of communication across the urban fabric.Footnote ¹¹ The straight line's importance went beyond mere functionality, however; it related to an aesthetic of order exemplified in legislation on building facades, protrusions, and heights. Between 1848 and 1882, these functional and aesthetic principles became enshrined in the various urban-planning and building regulations that gradually spread from Istanbul to provincial centers across the empire.Footnote ¹²

Because of its growing importance as a port city, Beirut became a target for these reforms as early as the 1860s. For example, with the promulgation of the Street and Building Regulation in 1863, the Ottoman Ministry of Public Works assigned an engineer to Beirut in order to “bring about the fixing and building of houses and roads in an organized manner.”Footnote ¹³ In the space of a few decades, Beirut moved away from the neighborhood-based model of urban management current in much of the region until the mid-19th century, which had been dependent on the collaboration of private-property owners, charitable institutions, and official oversight through the Hanafi court.Footnote ¹⁴ The relationship of the inhabitant to her city became mediated by a municipal council, which oversaw the application of building codes. Although charitable institutions, sectarian communities, and property owners continued to play a role in urban management, they did so under the centralized supervision of the municipal council and within the framework of the building code.

Changes in residential forms accompanied other urban transformations. Until the end of the 19th century, the most common domiciles in the inner city of Beirut were the dār, a self-contained, patrilocal residence with an internal court, and the ḥāra, a less well-off collection of abodes overlooking an internal court and inhabited by groupings from the same family branch, co-religionists, or people originating from the same geographic area.Footnote ¹⁵ As the city expanded beyond its old walls, a new residential typology referred to today as “the central-hall house” began to take form.

In its ideal form, the typology reflected the principles of urban planning and brought together scientific rationality of space, hygienic standards of urban living, and the aesthetic principle of the straight line. The introduction of several rooms, organized on both sides of a longitudinal central hall, encouraged separation between different family members as well as between the private family quarters and the central reception area. The location of the services (kitchen, storage, toilet, sink) in one corner of the plan allowed for outside access as well as for linking water and sewage refuse to the services provided by the municipality. The north–south orientation of the hall opened up the view of the Mediterranean from the city's slopes. The importance of having a scenic view increased with the popularity of large, glazed windows. By integrating other fashionable elements of the time—such as red Marseilles roof tiles and wall murals—the upper-class Beiruti house became a status symbol and the embodiment of a modern and urban way of life.Footnote ¹⁶ Through the division of functions within its spaces and the various levels of privacy it introduced between the outside world, domestic life, and family life, the central-hall house presented an appealing ideal of modern living revolving around the nuclear family—an ideal that was assumed by the intellectual discourse of domesticity.

HOME, NATION, MOTHER

In her speech at al-Jamʿiyya al-Urthudhuksiyya al-Khayriyya (Greek Orthodox Benevolent Society) in Tripoli on 3 June 1910, Julia Tuʿma introduced the concept of “the first sky” to her mostly female audience as “the ‘home’ [al-bayt], the miserable hut, if you wish. One room with a kitchen to its side. The abode of the family of which you are at the center. The home whose management has been given to you and the little kingdom over which God made you queen.” To signify what is beyond this physical description of bayt, Tuʿma used the English word “home” to evoke a place that constitutes “a shelter for the woman, a kingdom for the mother, a place of jollity for the man, a promenade for the father, and a pasture of well-being and joy for the children.”Footnote ¹⁷

A discursive shift in the understanding of home and an accompanying reconceptualization of women's role in society over the preceding half century prefigured Tuʿma's speech. This shift took place in intellectual circles across the region, and it transformed the house into a social space of citizenship. Initially under the influence of leading reformists and gradually across wider sections of society, as Afsaneh Najmabadi argues for 19th-century Iran, a growing conviction that the education of women was necessary for “progress” and “catching up” with the West reconfigured women from “house” to “manager of the house.”Footnote ¹⁸ Whereas as “house,” a woman formed part of a man's household and was subject to his management, as manager of the house she became responsible for administering its life and the life of its inhabitants. The discursive transition from premodern to modern hinged on the central position of women in the home, as the domain of the nuclear family and as a citizen's “first school.”

The earliest translation of this kind of domesticity into an idealized set of practices in Beirut was accomplished by Shahin Makariyus and two young lecturers at the Syrian Protestant College, Faris al-Nimr and Yaʿqub Sarruf. In 1876 they founded the scientific literary journal al-Muqtataf. Soon after, they introduced the fawāʾid baytiyya (domestic benefits) section, which in the space of a few years became the full-fledged and long-surviving regular feature bāb al-tadbīr al-manzilī (home management section). This section provided practical advice geared toward scientific management of the home and, with al-munāẓara wa-l-murāsala (letters to the editor), constituted an arena for debating the role of the woman at home and, by extension, in wider society. The debate in al-Muqtataf drew in an increasing number of female writers, turning the journal into one of the earliest publications with regular contributions by women.Footnote ¹⁹ Even after its relocation to Egypt in 1884, al-Muqtataf continued to play a pivotal role in the regional debate on domesticity, attracting a regular readership from various cities and towns in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt.

In the years following al-Muqtataf's move to Cairo, discourse about the home was gradually picked up by other Beirut-based periodicals. The discussions also migrated beyond the printed word and into speeches delivered at girls’ schools and at the podiums of literary and philanthropic societies.Footnote ²⁰ Moreover, by publishing speeches delivered outside Beirut and encouraging correspondence from their readers, the press helped forge a discursive field that linked Beirut to Zahla and Damascus in the east, Sidon in the south, and Hums and Baynu in the north and also extended to the expatriate communities of Egypt and the Americas.

An expansion in the discourse of domesticity during the last few years of Ottoman rule was typified in two events. The first was the publication of the first Beirut-based women's magazine, al-Hasnaʾ, immediately following the relaxation of press regulations after the Young Turk Revolution. The second was the formation of the philanthropic societies Yaqazat al-Fatat al-ʿArabiyya (Arab Girl's Awakening) in 1914 and Jamʿiyyat al-Aʿmal al-Khayriyya li-l-Fatayat al-Muslimat (Benevolent Society for Muslim Girls) in 1917 by young women from leading Muslim families in Beirut.Footnote ²¹ Up to that point, Muslim women as a group had played a largely passive role in the debate on women and domesticity, primarily following its development through the press.Footnote ²² This does not mean they were not envisioned as objects of reform. As we shall see in the next section, Thamarat al-Funun, which started out as the newspaper of Jamʿiyyat al-Funun (Society of the Arts), often placed Muslim women at the center of the newspaper's debates on moderation, authenticity, and domestic life.

A MATTER OF TASTE

The notion of dhawq constituted a major component of the discourse of domesticity and carried the management of the home beyond mere housework. As Labiba Hashim put it in a lecture republished in al-Hasnaʾ, “It is not enough for a woman to know about housework, but capability and taste are of her first duties.”Footnote ²³ As manager, the ideal woman was not only expected to carry out household chores efficiently but also to instill in the home a taste specific to an idealized middle-class morality. Through its emphasis on moderate consumption and simplicity, taste served in the discourse of domesticity both as a marker of class and as an indicator of a localized and authentic modernity distinguishable from its European, or ifranjī, counterpart.

Grounded in a long history of manuals of manners aimed at cultivating refined behavior and moral character through discipline and training, the category of taste was not new to the Ottoman intellectual sphere. Al-Kafawi's 17th-century lexicon, still in print in 19th-century Istanbul and Cairo, reveals some of the historical layers implied by the use of the word dhawq. In addition to denoting the physical sense of taste, lived experience, and an innate aptitude for sciences, the word related to the aesthetics of literature, or adab.Footnote ²⁴ Taste also related to adab in the sense of “manners,” for adab “in all its uses reflects a high valuation of the employment of the will in proper discrimination of correct order, behavior, and taste.”Footnote ²⁵

Although such manuals of manners were mainly aimed at the upper classes, the focus of social reformers in many parts of the region during the late 19th century shifted to a wider audience,Footnote ²⁶ reflecting the emergence of a modern public sphere and of an increasingly literate “middle class” enjoying greater access to modern commodities. This development can be observed in Beirut, where advice on domestic taste was explicitly addressed to “those of middling means.”Footnote ²⁷ In this way, the consumption habits of the emerging middle class became inscribed in the late Ottoman notion of dhawq. Writings on the topic emphasized spheres of consumption such as fashion, domesticity, and new forms of leisure, promoting an idealized middle-class sensibility and a conscious self-fashioning predicated upon moderate consumption.

The category of taste in its 19th-century understanding retained the role previously performed by manuals of manners in drawing social boundaries and cultivating social behavior. Intellectual discourse not only distinguished between good taste and bad taste but also employed the category of taste to distinguish between different lifestyles and social classes. Although considered to vary with a person's makeup and surroundings, taste could still be cultivated or, in the absence of proper upbringing, corrupted. Accordingly, proper exercise and refinement of the perceptive faculties were deemed necessary for the attainment of what was interchangeably referred to as sound (salīm) or correct (ṣaḥīḥ) taste.Footnote ²⁸

This understanding of taste by turn of the century intellectuals recalls Pierre Bourdieu's argument that taste's relationship with its social and economic conditions of production confers different social identities on objects and people. In the ability to decode, understand, and appropriate an object, the capacity to see (voir) becomes a function of knowledge (savoir). This ability to see an object as others fail to see it and to place it in a wider cultural field acquires meaning as distinction in a system of unequal distribution of capital, both economic and symbolic, where tastes function as “the practical affirmation of an inevitable difference.”Footnote ²⁹ This system of classified and classifying practices, which Bourdieu calls “the space of life-styles,” finds its expression in the minutiae of everyday life, from the choice of things (such as houses, furniture, paintings, books, and clothes) to practices (such as sports, games, and entertainment).Footnote ³⁰

Similarly, much of the literature on domesticity in Beirut concentrated on the management of daily practices, advocating simplicity and moderation in the consumption and ordering of domestic objects. While such discourse addressed itself to “those of middling means,” the upper classes formed the point of contrast to the advocated practices of moderation. In contrast to the downward self-demarcation described by Bourdieu, where the working class becomes the negative reference point at the bottom of the class structure, there are scant references to the poor in the discourse on the home in late Ottoman Beirut.Footnote ³¹ In the anxious struggle to find a place in a social order undergoing rapid change, it was the wealthier classes that constituted the object of criticism. In fact, the occasional appearances of the poor in the literature on domesticity only served to underline the dissociation of wealth from proper taste.Footnote ³² The intelligentsia continually evoked the wealth/taste dichotomy, emphasizing the dissociation of value from price and stressing the central role of women in achieving domestic order through proper edification, moderation, and a rationalized home economy. In her speech delivered at the Greek Orthodox Benevolent Society, for example, Julia Tuʿma criticized those who gave most value to a home's riches and glamour, privileging instead “what is cheap and comfortable to sit on.”Footnote ³³

Whereas positive comparisons to Europe sometimes served to justify new understandings of taste, articulating dhawq by comparing and contrasting with Europe became an increasingly ambivalent process by the turn of the century. Fashion (al-mūḍa), seen as an uncritical adoption of all that originated in Europe, became for many an object of criticism, as discourses on local morality and “oriental” nature were woven into the debate on taste. In a speech delivered at the Oriental Roman Catholic School in Zahla, ʿIsa Iskandar Maʿluf warned against “adopting that which does not go with our taste and is not of the nature of our country,” which he described as “Europeanization” (tafarnuj) and “false civilization” (al-tamaddun al-kādhib).Footnote ³⁴ The term “oriental” (sharqī) was often twinned with or replaced by references to “Syria,” and both terms served to emphasize a localized authenticity against ifranjī imports, imitations, and adoptions.Footnote ³⁵

The role of the home in negotiating a space for an idealized middle class between a perceived European culture and the social realities of Beirut comes out vividly in a debate about fashion that took place in 1905 and 1906 on the pages of the Greek Orthodox journal al-Mahabba. The editorial that launched the debate argued that the focus on appearances and the blind pursuit of fashion compromised a woman's “true” virtues, those revolving around her current or future role as mother and wife. The editorial explicitly tied this to the precarious economic position of “those of middling means,” arguing that by neglecting to manage her home properly and choosing instead to spend domestic income unwisely, a woman threatened to push the entire family to the edge of economic destitution.Footnote ³⁶ The editorial elicited many responses from both men and women, and the debate continued for more than a year. Several of the participants pointed to a connection between fashion and ifranjī imports, on the one hand, and the self-destructive pursuit of fashion by those of middling means, on the other. One contributor, irritated by the agency given to women in the debate, even blamed the quest for fashion on men instead: “we meant in the beginning to look like Europeans in order to get closer to them with the aim of facilitating our businesses . . . but we soon outdid them in so many things.”Footnote ³⁷

The anxiety over ifranjī fashion was not restricted to the Christian contributors to al-Mahabba; similar concerns also appeared on the pages of Thamarat al-Funun. Emphasizing the virtues of the “oriental” woman who restricts herself to her domestic circle, an article in Thamarat al-Funun warned prospective husbands against marrying her Europeanized counterpart, whose excesses transform her into a “public exhibit” for the hearts and eyes of others and whose education only serves to give her access to comic literature, fashion magazines, and romantic novels.Footnote ³⁸ The newspaper often attempted to ground this critique in religion, arguing for moderation following the Muslim dictum inna aḥsana al-umūri awsaṭuhā (the best of things is the middle course) and likening women's excessive ornamentation to the days of jāhiliyya, a derisive reference to the culture and beliefs of the Arabian peninsula before the advent of Islam.Footnote ³⁹

Although al-Mahabba also referred to the days of jāhiliyya to argue against women's ornamentation in public,Footnote ⁴⁰ its debate on fashion and women's duties elicited several responses from female readers writing in defense of their sex, unlike Thamarat al-Funun, where articles by women rarely appeared.Footnote ⁴¹ Notwithstanding the differences between the two periodicals, the home emerged in both as a remedy and as a way of grounding and localizing the disconcerting trend of blindly following the latest fashion from Europe.

LOVE OF THE GLITTERY AND CHEAP

Growing access to consumption challenged the model of domesticity presented in the intellectual sphere. One of the defining characteristics of the emerging middle class was its expanding investment in a form of consumption structured by the importation of more affordable, industrially produced commodities as well as by local manufacture, which was adapting to the production of industrialized countries. Given the lack of wholesale catalogs that can be linked to Beirut, the content of the “taste” driving those consumption choices is difficult to assess, but an idea of what it prioritized can be gleaned from reading consular trade reports, advertisements, and Hanafi court records in light of one another. Together these sources point to a relationship between the relative shift of importation from luxury items to cheaper commodities and the privileging of novelty and abundance over the construction of class boundaries advocated in the press.

While the last two decades of the 19th century witnessed an increase in furniture imports from the industrialized countries of Europe, this increase remained mostly confined to specific pieces of furniture.Footnote ⁴² Chairs, particularly those of bentwood from Austria known as “Thonet chairs,” constituted a considerable import to Beirut at a time when members of the French bourgeoisie were rejecting bentwood furniture.Footnote ⁴³ Similarly, English metal bedsteads were an early import and continued to increase in popularity in the decades before World War I, as the availability of varying models, sizes, and prices made them accessible to many.Footnote ⁴⁴ While these specific pieces of furniture continued to be imported until the French Mandate, local carpenters were quick to adapt their offerings, reproducing pieces of furniture from catalogs and tailoring them to customer demand. These were explicitly marketed as ifranjī, and a brand of carpentry, nijāra ifranjiyya, cropped up at least as early as 1889.Footnote ⁴⁵

As opposed to the limited consumption of imported furniture, small objects and ornamentation were imported to Beirut in considerable quantities. Already by 1890, the suqs were selling umbrellas and baby carriages, clocks and watches, European clothes and textiles, and “Chinese” and “Indian” commodities produced in Europe. By the time the first department store, Orosdi-Back, was inaugurated in 1900, there were several such suqs, and over the next decade they expanded their offerings to include binoculars, phonographs, battery-powered doorbells, sewing machines, hair and skin products, and other modern commodities.Footnote ⁴⁶ Stores such as Au Gant Rouge and Makhzan Suriyya had presented the city with outlets for consumption since the 1880s. Around the same time, major French department stores, such as Au Bon Marché, Grand Dépot, and Grand Magasin du Printemps, acquired wholesale channels into the region, and their emphasis on low prices and abundance found parallels in locally owned stores such as Au Petit Bon Marché, Magasin Cristal, Makhzan Suriyya, and Makhzan al-Badaʾiʿ al-Inkliziyya.Footnote ⁴⁷

As a more popularized type of consumption began to take root in Beirut, the suqs filled up with more affordable, industrially produced items. Toward the end of the 19th century, British, Austrian, and German products gained an edge over luxury items, which were a French specialization. Commercial reports written under the guidance of French consuls encouraged their merchants to cater to the needs of a market that thrives on plentiful but “cheap” consumption.Footnote ⁴⁸ While such proclamations alone need not be taken as indicative of actual trends in consumption, the remarks on the growing market in small, affordable objects are consistent with other evidence of the wider consumption opened up by industrial manufacture. Leora Auslander notes how with increased access to consumer goods in 18th-century France, small decorative objects (bibelot) became one of the early domains of consumption to go beyond a small elite.Footnote ⁴⁹ In Beirut, small decorative objects, approximated by the word tuḥfa (pl. tuḥaf), similarly constituted a domain where wider access to consumption first became apparent. An early mention of tuḥaf comes from Dalil Bayrut of 1889 in a mysterious advertisement for a store selling textiles and “oriental” goods: “We also have various kinds of oriental tuḥaf especially the famous old tuḥfa known as the lamp of the deceased Ilyas Musa al-Humsi. It is made in a strange oriental way that amazes the sight and confuses the minds.”Footnote ⁵⁰ What is meant by tuḥfa is less specific in later advertisements, but its domestic relevance is made more explicit: “we have various kinds of precious tuḥaf that people of taste would be proud to give as gifts to their friends or to have at home.”Footnote ⁵¹

In parallel to these developments, advertisements began explicitly addressing the home as a target for their wares. In addition to marketing “the latest fashion” to “those of good taste,” they began to frame their wares as filling a “need” for homes and families wishing to be modern.Footnote ⁵² Although they resonated with intellectual concerns in their appeal to those of “good” and “sound” taste, many advertisements explicitly linked those tastes to an appreciation of imported goods or their local imitations. Advertisements alone do not provide clear indications of what people actually consumed, but their emphasis on novelty and abundance is echoed in consular trade reports and the Hanafi court records. Several advertisements from the late 1880s linked domestic furniture to the needs of “this age” and to the “latest arrivals” of “the new model” (al-ṭarz al-jadīd).Footnote ⁵³ The use of words such as ṭarz and mūḍa to refer to fashion also demonstrates that the appeal to novelty acquired fixed and recognizable words during the same period, replacing earlier descriptives such as “new designs with every steamship.”Footnote ⁵⁴

While the intellectual discourse of domesticity found in the well-managed home the antidote for the quest after the latest fashion, advertisements appealed to fashion and novelty, even in the domestic space. In addition, while intellectual literature on home management primarily linked good taste to an ethics of moderation concerned with managing the household economy and preserving a postulated “oriental” authenticity, many advertisements linked this taste to the latest fashion and the latest import. “Europe” often emerged in advertisements as a marker of modernity rather than a counterpoint to authenticity. The language of authenticity and of valuing local labor eventually entered advertisements, as local manufacturing expanded after the turn of the century with furniture producers such as al-Siyufi. But even in those cases, the authenticating potential of ifranjī goods still seeped through in phrases such as “comparable to the best factories of Europe” and “like Europe.”Footnote ⁵⁵

ON USELESS INSTRUMENTS OF PLEASURE

Although an emerging mode of popular consumption centered on the home, its wedding of taste to novelty and ifranjī imports was thus often in tension with the prescriptive aesthetics of moderation and authenticity propounded in the intellectual sphere. Ending the analysis here, however, would leave unexplained the roles played by popular objects of consumption in their specific contexts. Drawing on Hanafi court records, this section locates some of the attraction of novel objects in their capacity for modifying existing practices. The aim is to carry the understanding of taste beyond the emphasis on its construction and its apparent fascination with all that was ifranjī, suggesting instead ways in which the novelty of objects opened up new interpretive possibilities. This is particularly relevant in a modern context where material objects not only are constructed and utilized to signify a person's place in the social world but also constitute an essential part of the modern subject's self-understanding.Footnote ⁵⁶

Various scholars have pointed out the dangers of conducting quantitative research on or extrapolating generalizations from court processes.Footnote ⁵⁷ Nevertheless, court records can be used to form an idea about when certain possessions became common enough to be included in legal cases. Given that the court was a highly codified process for resolving marital conflicts, contested possessions in such cases can also be connected to expectations, representations, and gendered roles. Even if we were to take these court procedures as nonindicative of a person's range of possessions, they divulge information on the gendered dimension of objects as they were commonly presented in a court of law.

Like consular trade reports and advertisements, court records indicate an upward trend in domestic consumption as they increasingly became concerned with myriad inexpensive commodities such as cups, goblets, tumblers, carafes, vases, ashtrays, handkerchiefs, pictures, frames, and small decorative items. With the growing affordability of both imports and local products, the possessions of men and women alike began to expand to include porcelain, ceramic, cut-glass products, and gilded items.Footnote ⁵⁸

As the number of freestanding (as opposed to built-in) commodities inside the home increased, many were categorized along familiar gender lines in Hanafi marital cases. A rise in the number of kitchen utensils, linen, and personal items suggests that women became more invested in their roles as wives, a role underlined by the trousseau (jihāz) they brought into the marriage. The man, for his part, was becoming more materially involved in domestic life through the acquisition of fancy objects for the purpose of fulfilling his role as host, such as porcelain and crystal products, as well as of bedroom items, such as dressers and metal bedsteads, which were rarely contested by a wife in marital disputes. Although at the turn of the century metal bedsteads were a relatively recent entry in a man's list of possessions, they present a case where the gendered division in the Hanafi court was actually reinforced through novelty. Before the spread of elevated beds, mattresses could equally belong to men or women and were open to contestation at the Hanafi court.Footnote ⁵⁹ With the entry of metal bedsteads, the bedroom remained a mixed space as far as court representations were concerned, but some of its possessions were rigidified. Bedding that constituted part of a woman's trousseau was renamed ṭaqm takht (bed-set) to complement the entry of the bed into male possession.Footnote ⁶⁰

Whereas the examples given so far show how new objects could at times reinforce gender divides in the Hanafi court of Beirut, this was not always the case. The remainder of this section examines a marital dispute involving a phonograph and the grey area it opened in court. Marital cases in the Hanafi court were usually initiated by women, and in most of the cases from the period under consideration women plaintiffs came to court to demand from their husbands their dower, alimony, a marital home, or the delivery of possessions if they were not living together. Because possessions were a central factor in many marital cases, court registers often include long lists of possessions with their estimated prices. When not the direct cause for a plaintiff seeking the arbitration of the Hanafi court, objects were often part of the process of bargaining, claims, and counterclaims. Since many of the possessions brought to court fell along clear gender divides, they often functioned as chips in the bargaining process, brought forth to counter the demands of the other party.

When one spring day in 1910, a pregnant woman, Hasiba, appeared before the court to demand that her husband pay her dower, what began as a standard court case took an unusual turn. Her husband, Yusuf, an employee of the tramway company, demanded in return that Hasiba return his phonograph and sixteen records. What normally ensued in other marital-conflict cases was a tallying back and forth of claims and counterclaims, followed by a request for witnesses for the claimant and defendant, usually culminating in a piecemeal solution. Yusuf, perhaps thinking that claiming possessions in return would improve his bargaining position, found himself in an unexpected situation. The court refused to take his deposition into account and ruled categorically in the woman's favor, granting her the remainder of her dowry, pocket money from her husband, and, effectively, the phonograph and sixteen records, all based on the fact that “a phonograph is an instrument of pleasure and music with no value, and it deserves to be broken.”Footnote ⁶¹

There was nothing inherent about the phonograph to explain this reaction, since, less than a year later, a phonograph appears again, this time in an inheritance dispute. In this case, the same judge did not debate the American phonograph's worth, and he valued it at 1,700 piasters, a little more than one-sixth of the value of the total objects contested.Footnote ⁶² The judge's objection to the phonograph as “a useless instrument of pleasure” can be better understood by placing the instrument in the context it was associated with and by exploring how it upset the usual procedure of marital cases.

Phonographs were becoming more widespread in Beirut in the decade before World War I, and some advertisements placed them squarely in the context of factories, world expositions, and the quest for new technologies.Footnote ⁶³ While this was also true to a certain degree of the sewing machine, by the turn of century sewing machines were already “domesticated” as products intended “for the needs of families,” and it was not unusual for them to be included in a woman's dower.Footnote ⁶⁴ By contrast, and because of its association with pleasure and the life of the cafés, the phonograph brought into a marital case modes of socialization frowned upon by the Hanafi court.Footnote ⁶⁵

In addition, by the beginning of the 20th century phonographs had acquired a definite place in a constellation of modern practices defined by taste and class. The Ukrainian novelist Ahatanhel Krymsky describes the domestic entertainment of the wealthy in Beirut, who held live performances by professional singers in their homes.Footnote ⁶⁶ Coupled with the growth of a record industry in Egyptian and shāmī (Syrian) songs, phonographs opened up a kind of entertainment previously reserved for the wealthy classes—one centered on listening to professional singers—to the homes of those of the emerging middle class. Record-exchange schemes, which offered those “bored with the music they have” the chance to replace their worn-out records with new ones, made the latest musical recordings available at inexpensive prices.Footnote ⁶⁷ As the marital case discussed previously shows, there were members of this class—including Yusuf, the tramway company employee—who were investing in these agents of social mobility.

The phonograph, in other words, belonged to a valuing system that revolved around the quest for the new, changing musical tastes, and the growing assertiveness of an emerging middle class. It was also suspected of generating the kind of domestic socialization that escaped the court's purview and that cut across gender boundaries and geographic boundaries by bringing the world of cafés and global expositions into the home. This meant that the phonograph could not be absorbed into court procedures as readily as the sewing machine, and, therefore, had the unintended effect of upsetting those procedures. More than anything, this case illustrates how new objects had the potential to impact court practices and open gender roles to new possibilities of interpretation.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

For a large section of the intellectual class, the category of “taste” presented novel ways for organizing the rapid encroachments of a new material world in a socially meaningful way. The centrality of material concerns to the intellectual understanding of taste further propagated the home as a sphere of consumption. Despite overlaps between the discourse of domesticity and actual consumption trends, the latter's investment in the new and foreign was often in tension with the aesthetics of moderation and authenticity propagated by the intellectual literature. What the phonograph contributes in this instance is the opportunity to look beyond taste as a constructed category and to open up a view of the role objects could play and of the potential for novelty to subvert the existing social order. The case discussed here has its limitations since by the late 19th century, the Hanafi court was sought for arbitration in marital conflicts almost exclusively by Muslims. Still, some of the issues discussed in the last section, such as access to forms of entertainment available only to the wealthy, go beyond the context of the Hanafi court.

A large segment of the emerging middle class was invested in consumerist promises of novelty, abundance, and social mobility. Explaining its recalcitrance to follow intellectual advice in terms of a blind focus on appearances, without attempting to understand the meaning of its practices, risks marginalizing it from the narrative. By using a variety of archival sources to reconstruct and bring other matters of taste into the historical narrative, this article attempts to broaden the understanding of modernity in Beirut. Evaluating the attempts to localize concerns of reform and modernity and to articulate them in a familiar language places Beirut in relation to and in direct dialogue with other cities and towns in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and the rest of the Ottoman Empire. In these contexts, “authenticating” modernity often entailed a dual political struggle over the boundaries of class and against a “Europe” or, in time, “the West.”Footnote ⁶⁸ A closer look at taste, its uses, and the popular challenges to it presents an example of how actual practices of consumption upset those attempts at authentication.

Beirut's historical transformation remained marked by its location as a small city separated from Europe and Istanbul by language and geographic distance. There is also no indication that the discourse of domesticity ever took a centrally dictated character within the educational system, as it did in Egypt and Iran.Footnote ⁶⁹ At the same time, the opportunities afforded by growing consumption around the turn of the century allowed small manufacturers in Beirut to survive the onslaught of cheap, industrialized imports by catering to the tastes of an emerging middle class and its quest for the new and always changing. A reconsideration of the history of the city that takes both its centrality and peripherality into account, and attends to the alternative uses of taste brought about by this position, can shed light on the origins of the middle class in terms that complicate the analytical categories of religion and sect and bring in those who were neither intellectuals nor merchants into the city's history.