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Around midnight, a scream pierced the silence that hung over the neighborhood of the Jews in Jerusalem. At least one neighbor heard it, but nobody saw anything. The next morning, a woman named Sarah was found dead in the street, lying face down in the entrance to the house she rented. The judge-administrator (kadı) appointed several officials to investigate, among them two of the leaders of the Jewish community and the city's head surgeon (jarrah başı). Upon examining the body, the surgeon found that Sarah had been stabbed in the head and in the elbow. The neighbor who testified she had heard the scream claimed she did not know "who did it." She told the court that the house door was open, although it is not clear from the record if she had noticed it at the time of the incident or only after the fact. The court register provides no further information. 1 Sarah's death is, quite literally, shrouded in darkness. The only sure sign that signaled in real time that something out of the ordinary was happening, was the screaming thatgiven the late hourprobably woke up the neighbor. We can only imagine her, lying on her mattress, trying hard to listen to the voices in the dark, her heart pounding. She may have even gotten up to the window, peeking carefully outside, but could see nothing but darkness.Hearing without seeing, or without seeing well, was one of the defining experiences of the preindustrial night. This chapter seeks to capture something of this experience. It follows darkness as it fell, from sunset to bedtime, beginning with an attempt to "listen around," or to reconstruct the aural texture of the night. While hearing was much more important than during the day for information and orientation, it could not compensate for the loss of vision. The main argument in these first sections is that the deep darkness of the Early Modern city undermined people's sense of control, aggravating fears of very real nocturnal dangers. The second part of the chapter focuses on the domicile, the fundamental function of which is to counter this

Street lighting was first introduced into Ottoman cities in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, unlike in larger Ottoman cities, where coal gas was used, in Jerusalem it was kerosene that served as burning material, creating the distinct nocturnal reality that is here called the ‘kerosene night’. This reality was the result and, simultaneously, one of the most glaring manifestations of Jerusalem’s economic, administrative and infrastructural peripherality. Between the early 1890s and the First World War, kerosene allowed the Jerusalem municipality an affordable means to respond to inhabitants’ expectations for more light. Both public expectations and municipal action were fanned by a discourse that associated street lighting with Enlightenment, order and progress. Yet, kerosene illumination also set the limits of nocturnal conviviality and frustrated the very expectations it kindled. Measured against larger metropoles, the relative darkness of Jerusalem heightened among residents feelings of provinciality and governmental neglect — feelings that the kerosene lamps, paradoxically, brought to light.

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Based on quantitative and qualitative analysis of visual representations and written texts, this study argues that officers, civil officials, and urban professionals who came of age in the late Hamidian era adopted the mustache as an expression of a generational identification and a related self-consciously modern masculinity that defined itself against the bearded, Hamidian order. After 1908, when the instigators of the revolution and their supporters climbed up the social and political hierarchies, the mustache rose with them and became the facial ornament of the most powerful people in the empire. Considering the common association of the mustache with youth, its adoption as a marker of identification hints at the unsettling of longtime ageist hierarchies but also, at the durability and adaptability of gender ones.