'Islamic chic'
http://www.thefashions.org/

The modern Islamic Woman

http://kilden.forskningsradet.no/c18375/artikkel/vis.html?tid=18412

http://www.slc.edu/magazine/outcomes/glimpse_yasin.php

Islam is setting the style after Turkish poll win
"Allah is Great Clothing"

Flanked by mannequins modestly swathed in Islamic-style headgear and flowing robes, Mustafa Karaduman says he is a happy man these days.


Mustafa Karaduman of 'Allah is Great Clothing' at his boutique
For the owner of Turkey's largest Islamic-style clothing chain, Tekbir Giyim, or "Allah is Great Clothing", the stunning success of the Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party, or AKP, in last month's election is a business opportunity.

"Allah willing, more of our sisters will feel freer to cover their heads in keeping with our faith," said Mr Karaduman at his main boutique in Istanbul's religiously conservative Fatih neighbourhood.

From a poor background in the mainly Kurdish province of Malatya, Mr Karaduman, 45, started his chain in the mid-1980s when political Islam was on the rise.

Today he has more than 200 outlets across Turkey and exports a third of his goods, mostly to Germany, where there are about two million Turkish guest workers.

advertisementTekbir's clients include Halide Izetbegovic, the wife of the former Bosnian president, Alia Izebetgovic, as well as followers of Yusuf Islam, formerly the pop star Cat Stevens.

"Ensuring that more Turkish women dress Islamic style is in fact my mission," he said, pointing to his sales girls dressed in ankle-length maroon skirts with matching silk headscarves.

Mr Karaduman's goal flies in the face of the pro-secular policies of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, who made women cast off their veils as part of his radical drive to catapult the fledgling republic into the western world.

Turkey's pro-secular military, who see themselves as the custodians of Ataturk's legacy, have kept up the battle against Islamic fundamentalism and favour bans on Islamic headscarves at government offices and state-run schools and universities.

In a concerted campaign to persuade the military that the AKP has no secret agenda to steer Turkey towards Islamic rule, the party chairman, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, say he believes in keeping religion and politics separate and that easing such bans is not a government priority.

So, when Bulent Arinc, a senior AKP figure and the new speaker of parliament, arrived last month with his wife, who covers her head, to see off the solidly pro-secular president, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, pro-secular sensitivities were re-ignited.

Mr Karaduman was delighted. "She was extremely chic, I can't understand what the fuss is about," he said.

Tekbir creations range from shapeless, ankle-length coats to bright red flared gauzy skirts with matching frilly tops and turbans.

Professional women can choose from a wide range of smart trouser suits. "The Islamic part," explains Kerime Colakel, a veteran salesgirl, "is that all our clothes conceal the hips and the ankles."

cok guzel!
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=C6Jc4_V-Elc

Have a look:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZr0nj_uO_M&feature=related

For the pious yet stylish young Muslim woman this season it's stone or soft brown. Ankle-length skirt or coat closed to the neck, hat and scarf betraying not a wisp of hair, sleeves to the wrist, all in rippling silk, satin or velvet.
At God is Great Clothing, an emporium in central Istanbul scaling the heights of Islamic chic, Mustafa Karaduman cannot shift his creations fast enough. A pioneer in the design and manufacture of attractive clothing made in strict conformity with what he says is laid down in the Qur'an, Mr Karaduman has been dubbed Allah's Tailor or The Prophet's Couturier.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/turkey/story/0,,1788565,00.html#article_continue

Another colorful personality of the period is Ali Pasha, the Albanian tyrant who in 1787 rules Epirus for the Ottomans from the town of Ioannina. His dream was to break away from the Ottoman Empire and create his own independent state in Ipirus, with the collaboration of Napoleon. But In 1798 he forms an alliance with the British and takes Preveza from the French. He is given Parga by the British who see in Ali Pashas a thorn in the side of the Ottomans. Even Lord Byron visits, as described in his poem Childe Harold, calling Ali Pasha a generous and cultured man and the 'Muslim Bonaparte'. The Ottomans find him useful too but when he orders the assasination of an opponent in Constantinople, Sultan Mahmud II has had enough and sends troops to depose him. 20,000 Turkish troops are diverted from fighting the rebelious Greeks in the Peloponessos finally forcing him to surrender after agreeing to pardon him. While waiting in the Pantelimon Monastery for his pardon to be read, he is executed, his head displayed for 3 days in Ioanina and then sent to Constantinople where it is displayed there as well. His body is buried in Ioannina, his head in Constantinople. Though a sick and perverted individual who murdered and tortured who he pleased, he was a ruthless and clever leader and played an important part in the independence of Greece from the Ottomans by engaging the Turkish troops when they might have been fighting the Greeks.

Wow! Memories, I stood here:
http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Europe/Spain/Andalucia/Granada/Alhambra/photo570221.htm

http://www.magicspain.com/andalucia/granada/

very long
http://mbarchives.blogspot.com/2006/02/byron-and-ottoman-empire.html

Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East

The author of this book acknowledges that a seemingly large part of the material presented in this study has appeared before now in several of his own publications, listed in the preface and in the bibliography. In fact, Ehud R. Toledano's earliest publication, The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Suppression, carries almost the same title as the present volume. In one place he states: "These were either thoroughly revised, updated with few changes, or just reassessed in light of recent research. In some cases, sections were taken out of articles and woven into the narrative of other chapters" (xi). Referring to certain items in the text, the author adds in a footnote, "substantially revised versions of the last three items are woven into various parts of the present book" (136).

These and other such "confessions" should not detract from the ultimate value of putting together in one volume the end product of several years of research on a topic that still engages and fascinates the modern reader. At least one thing Toledano finally puts to rest, namely the romanticized concept of the Ottoman harem system, which he shows was chiefly the result of many a European traveler's fertile imagination!

In addition to military-administrative slavery, the author distinguishes other forms of slavery: the Kul/ Harem system, agricultural slaves, and domestic slavery. He accomplishes this in an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. Aside from passing references to earlier periods, the discussion is limited to the situation as it existed during the nineteenth century and its abolition before the First World War.

The introduction, "Ottoman Slavery and the Slave Trade," deals in general terms with slavery and challenges many of the standard writers on the subject (e.g., Inalcik, Pipes, Findley, Patterson, and Lewis) regarding the question of the servility of slaves. Several times the reader is asked to see "further below"--a rather disruptive request!

The first two chapters deal with Kul/ Harem slavery, which was by far the most important aspect of the Ottoman slave system. There are special sections on African eunuchs and slave dealers. Also included here is the firsthand report (in translation from the original Turkish text) of the story of a Circassian slave-girl that Toledano had published in a previous article.
Agricultural slavery is dealt with in the third chapter, where the story is told of large groups of Circassians, "ostensibly Muslim," who were thrown out of southern Russia and then showed up in Ottoman territory to become what the author refers to as "agricultural slaves" (84). A historical background section on Russian-Ottoman confrontation in the Caucasus region would have been welcome to help explain the exodus of Circassians from that region; an aspect of the problem is still with us, in the issue of Chechnya.

In Chapter four, the author reviews the reform policies of the Ottoman government (the so-called Tanzimat), and how these policies ultimately led to the abolition of the institution of slavery. Chapter five, which is perhaps the most useful chapter for the researcher on Ottoman and general Middle Eastern slavery, brings the reader up-to-date on recent publications on the subject. Rather immodestly, Toledano includes himself writing, "My own ventures into the suppression of the Ottoman slave trade ... have attempted to rescue the topic from the oblivion it does not merit" (138). The concluding section, "Ottoman Slavery in World Slavery" attempts to place the topic within a wider context, but Toledano gives up that exercise and quickly returns to make further comments on some of the points made earlier in the discussion.
The book would have benefited from a glossary of technical terms, especially those in Turkish and Arabic, for there are scores of such terms in italics throughout the book. The index is rather skimpy and needs to be more comprehensive.

By Ehud R. Toledano. (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1998. Pp. xii, 185. $18.00.)


Toledano's book will become a standard work on the subject together with Leslie P. Peirce's The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (1993). Both studies seem to be quite indispensable for a proper understanding of the subject.
Michel M. Mazzaoui University of Utah