The pen and the public: Ahmed Rasim’s literary engagement with Muslim women and family politics in the late Ottoman Empire

Ahmed Rasim was a writer and political actor who influenced public opinion through literary circles and the press. This article examines his engagement with the politicization of the family in the late Ottoman Empire, a period marked by Sultan Abdülhamid II’s authoritarian rule. Focusing on his innovative use of the pocket novel genre, we analyze how Rasim, diverging from the mainstream literary tendency to depict non-Muslim, morally ambiguous, or enslaved women, strategically presented free, Muslim women as protagonists to explore evolving notions of sexuality, gender roles, and the fragility of the Ottoman family structure. By revisiting these fin-de-siècle anxieties about population and body control and drawing on the theories of governmentality (Michel Foucault) and resistance (Michel de Certeau), we argue that Rasim’s work offers a unique lens on politically motivated attempts to redefine manhood and womanhood amid the social transformations of the Hamidian era.