fig. 1 “Arabian Decoration.” Plate XXVII from Auguste Racinet, L’ornament polychrome (Paris: Firmin-Didot et cie, 1885–87). n nineteenth-century Europe, the issue of ornament constituted the core of a new line of critical investigations of Islamic architecture. At the heart of this scholarship was the customary view of Islamic architecture as a purely decorative and, therefore, weak and superluous tradition—a negative stock image, counterposed to the assumed sobriety and tectonic soundness of the Western building tradition. he European image of Islamic architecture, however, was not entirely deined by the rudimentary polarities of this Orientalist vision. A close look at nineteenth-century scholarship reveals the workings of other discourses of diference and a diverse range of professional interests. he unrelenting essentialism of the standard Orientalist approach was tightly intertwined with the issue of applied arts reform in Europe itself. he Islamic decorative tradition, made available to the Western center through the regulatory apparatus of scientiic abstraction, was called upon to provide remedies to the looming “crisis” in European taste and to act as a repository of ideas that would meet the demands of modern commodity culture. Many prominent researchers from the middle to the late nineteenth century, from Owen Jones to Jules Bourgoin and Léon Parvillée, considered the “inherent rationality” of Islamic decoration an indispensable asset in achieving the desired rapprochement between ine arts and industry in the modern world. 1 Western Europeans valued the richness and versatility of two-dimensional ornamentation in the Islamic building tradition, involving the use of intricate surface design, complex 45 DAPA 28 Ahmet Ersoy is associate professor of history at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. His work deals with issues related to the politics of cultural representation, art, architecture, and photography in the late Ottoman period. His publications include Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeastern Europe (1775–1945), vol. III, coedited with Maciej Górny and Vangelis Kechriotis (2010), and Architecture and the Late Ottoman Historical Imaginary: Reconiguring the Architectural Past in a Modernizing Empire (2015). 44 Ahmet Ersoy CRAFTS, ORNAMENT, AND THE DISCOURSE OF CULTURAL SURVIVAL IN THE LATE OTTOMAN EMPIRE