Magic, Modernity, and the Abominable Act

Samuel Dolbee, New York University

In the late nineteenth century, modernity theoretically killed everything.  Railroads annihilated time, germs vanquished miasma, Weberian bureaucratic rationality sucked the life out of magic, and Marx and Engels tag-teamed their way into an intellectual body-slam of Hegel.  Or so the story goes.  In practice, as books like Nile Green’s Bombay Islam show, things were a little more complicated.  “Bombay’s industrialization,” Green argues, “was inseparable from the enchantment of its mills, stations and dockyards.” (236)  Mass production not only existed alongside magic and miracles, it provided the economic conditions that enabled them in the first place.

Today’s document opens a window onto these processes in 1884 Istanbul.  It involves a deceptively simple case.  A man from Baghdad named Abdülvehhab had set up shop in Aksaray.  From his base near the post office, he performed feats such as squeezing prayer beads and extracting water from them or writing on egg shells and making the yolk, well, yok (Turkish for absent).  Abdülvehhab – and GOB – might have contended these were simply illusions.  But the police called them tricks.  And since Abdülvehhab used these tricks to, in the Interior Ministry’s words, “deceive the gullible,” they had some unequivocal words for the magician from Baghdad: “this kind of magician will not be allowed to live in Istanbul” (böyle bir sihirbazın Der Saadet'te ikameti ca'iz olamayacağından).  And so, seemingly, ended the career of Aksaray Abdülvehhab and this post. 

But the higher-ups at the Interior Ministry did not want to let the case be this simple.  In a note scrawled just below the tale of Abdülvehhab – and at least three times longer than it - an inspector related the following shaggy dog tale, culled from the register of the secret police.  In Dizdariye, an apparently ill gentleman called Asım Effendi went with his wife Nefisa Hatun to see a local shaykh named Abdülrahman Effendi for help.  But Abdülrahman wasn’t home.  Apparently seeking an alternative to the alternative medicine, Asım Effendi and Nefisa Hatun pulled out a revolver.  Following the Chekhov's gun principle of narrative before Chekhov himself established it, they made sure the gun went off, critically injuring Abdülrahman Effendi’s wife Ayşe and pilfering thirty gold pieces.  Subsequent police investigations ordered Asım Effendi to a hospital, where he died shortly after. 

The investigations also resulted in a long talk with Abdülrahman, which seems to be the reason for the note in the first place.  In this interview, the shaykh explains his healing practices, which, if you’ve made it this far, you’ll recall from the bag of tricks wielded by the bad boy of Istanbul magic himself, Abdülvehhab.  For a headache, Abdülrahman would ask the sufferer to bring an egg.  Next he would ask the afflicted to read something (which, given literacy numbers at the time, probably refers to saying a prayer as well as reading an actual text).  While the person read, Abdülrahman would switch the egg the person brought with a specially prepared egg, emptied of its contents through a tiny hole.  At the moment of truth, Abdülrahman would crack the egg on the person’s head, revealing – miraculously – neither white nor yolk on the inside, healing the person of his or her pain.  For people with afflictions of the heart, Abdülrahman prescribed a different treatment.  Again the sick person would read.  And again Abdülrahman would make use of the misdirection of attention, this time sliding a water-soaked sponge into his palm alongside his prayer beads.  When he squeezed the sponge, the afflicted person reading only saw water coming off the prayer beads, not the sponge whose extraction may or may not have led to later Ottoman conservation measures.  In any case, Abdülrahman suggested the sick person drink the water.

The prayer-bead-squeezing and egg-breaking shaykh did not come up with the tricks on his own.  Graciously, he told the police he received permission from the late shaykh Mehmet Effendi, who hailed from the Maghreb.  And, Abdülrahman told the police, he did not even come to Istanbul to get in on the okuyuculuk game.  In perhaps the strangest twist of this very, very strange document, Abdülrahman confided to the investigator that he came to Istanbul “to look after the affairs of his son” who had been caught up in “the abominable act,” (fi‘l şeni‘) which refers to sexual assault but elsewhere on our site is found in reference to homosexuality. 

So.  For those of you not keeping track at home, this document is one page with three magicians, one revolver, one victim of a revolver wound, one accomplice to assault, one son caught up in the abominable act, one sick man who dies in an asylum, and innumerable broken eggs/cured headaches/sips of sponge water. 

Although the Inspector dispelled the aura around Abdülvehhab by explaining the preselected eggs and sponges in palm behind his powers, the document attests to the persistent allure of folk healers.  Even as – and perhaps especially as – industrial waste clogged the Golden Horn, people continued to believe in powers beyond the steam ships that increasingly linked Istanbul to the rest of the world.  

Source: BOA, Y-A-HUS 176/72 (12 Rebiülahir 1301 [10 Şubat 1884])

sponge

assault