A piece of history i never heard

"In the last years of the empire, a French firm offered half a million francs to turn 150,000 street dogs in Istanbul into gloves. The Sultan — very hard pressed for cash — nobly refused. But the Ottoman world was relentlessly changing. In 1888 the famous Pera Palace Hotel opened to service the needs of passengers off the Orient Express from Venice, which arrived at the newly built Sirkeci station on the Golden Horn. Traffic in the city became speedier, and mechanical. The street dogs now loafed about tramlines, fell asleep beneath the wheels of stationary omnibuses, and flopped down in the path of speeding cabs. They became three-legged, and worse.

A sharing from Hamza Yusuf - Zaytuna Institute and College


I was thinking about something I had read of the extraordinary care that Imam al-Rifa’i showed to a sick dog that he nursed back to health to the bewilderment of his fellow townsmen. This reminded me of something I had read in a book about the Ottomans, Lords of the Horizons. I wanted to share it with you:


By 1918 the Sultan no longer possessed any authority. Women were going to university, a military cabal still ruled the empire, the First World War was just ended, and in Turkey another war - for Turkey itself - was about to begin. The Board of Hygiene, too, had all but done its work. The drains were laid. There were asphalt roads, and pavements, so that mud and garbage had become discrete items to be picked out and avoided, except by the dustbin men who rode up and down the streets on collection day on smart new Davis refuse lorries from America. Mangy and lazy, three-legged and obtrusive, the dogs of Istanbul were rounded up again. It took five days with nets and bait and leashes. They did not shoot or poison them, or get in touch with the enterprising French glove company, for perhaps within the empire’s shrunken breast there remained a suggestion of that modesty which shrinks from forcing violence upon the world, an echo of those Turkish curves. The dogs were locked up in an old tramp steamer and transported, howling and fighting, to a waterless island off the southern Marmara coast, where they were turned loose. And this time they never tried to swim back."

Jason Goodwin, Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998, 325-326.