Associated Products
Immigration, Return, and the Politics of Citizenship: Russian Muslims in the Ottoman Empire, 1860-1914 (Article)Title: Immigration, Return, and the Politics of Citizenship: Russian Muslims in the Ottoman Empire, 1860-1914
Author: Meyer, James H.
Abstract: The immigration of Muslims into the Ottoman Empire, especially from Russia and the Balkans, is a feature of late imperial Ottoman history whose legacy remains strong to this day. Millions of individuals in present-day Turkey trace their roots back to the Balkans or Russia, and interest in these regions remains high in Turkey. Estimates of Muslim immigrants to the Ottoman Empire vary, although most sources place the total number of Muslims leaving Russia for the Ottoman Empire in the latter half of the 19th century and early 20th century at well over one million.1 As Russian Muslims in 1897 were considered to number nearly 20 million while Ottoman Muslims counted in the same year numbered 14.1 million, this population shift involved a significant proportion of the Muslim populations of both empires.
Year: 2007
Primary URL:
http://www.jhmeyer.net/Meyer-IJMES%20Article.pdfAccess Model: Volume ID: 39
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: International Journal of Middle East Studies
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
For the Russianist in Istanbul and the Ottomanist in Russia: A Guide to the Archives of Eurasia (Article)Title: For the Russianist in Istanbul and the Ottomanist in Russia: A Guide to the Archives of Eurasia
Author: Meyer, James H
Abstract: The histories of the Ottoman Empire and Russia (not to mention Turkey and the USSR) are not only deeply entwined within one another, they also run parallel in many ways. During the Middle Ages, both Moscow and the Ottomans expanded to rule over ethnically and religiously diverse populations, and their respective methods of expansion and rule provide numerous points of contrast and comparison between the two states. Efforts to modernize focused the attention of state officials in both empires, and in the nineteenth century both Russia and the Ottoman Empire undertook reforms which would have a tremendous impact upon the two states, and which often provoked responses from their respective subjects which assumed a national or religious character. In the early twentieth century, meanwhile, constitutional revolutions in both empires preceded noisy periods of mass politics and, eventually, increasing authoritarianism. At the conclusion of the imperial era, the First World War would mark the eleventh time the Ottoman and Russian armies went into combat against one another since the mid-seventeenth century.
Year: 2008
Primary URL:
http://www.jhmeyer.net/Meyer-AbImperio.pdfPeriodical Title: Ab Imperio
Judicial Practice: Institutions and Agents in the Islamic World (Book)Title: Judicial Practice: Institutions and Agents in the Islamic World
Author: Ergene, Bogac
Abstract: This book brings together edited articles from the second and third editions of the Encyclopaedia of Islam that are relevant to Islamic judicial practice, institutions, and agents. The material presented in this compilation identifies and explains key concepts germane to the application of Islamic law. It demonstrates the wide spectrum of variations in the functions and operations of judicial actors and institutions in different Islamic contexts, and reveals the complicated relationship between legal doctrine and practice. As such, this book constitutes a much-needed introductory volume and a convenient starting-point for readers interested in Islamic judicial practice.
Year: 2009
Publisher: Brill
ISBN: 9789004179349
Why did Ummu Gulsum go to court? Ottoman Legal Practice between History and Anthropology (Article)Title: Why did Ummu Gulsum go to court? Ottoman Legal Practice between History and Anthropology
Author: Ergene, Bogac
Abstract: This article offers a critical assessment of the existing literature on Ottoman courts of law, which characterizes the court's operations as single-mindedly legalistic and socially disinterested. There is a conceptual discrepancy between this literature and recent legal and anthropological studies of modern Islamic courts, which highlight the influence on the court's actions of communal considerations, such as the desire to make peace among disputants. With reference to a specific rape incident in eighteenth-century Anatolia, I propose in this article a characterization of Ottoman legal practice that acknowledges the contextual and socially-bounded nature of the court's actions.
Year: 2010
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Islamic Law and Society
Publisher: Brill
Intergenerational Mobility in the in the Ottoman Empire: Observations from Eighteenth-Century Kastamonu (Article)Title: Intergenerational Mobility in the in the Ottoman Empire: Observations from Eighteenth-Century Kastamonu
Author: Kaygun, Atabey
Author: Ergene, Bogac
Abstract: Based on probate estate inventories from eighteenth-century Kastamonu in north Anatolia, this study examines intergenerational mobility patterns in one Ottoman provincial town. Although the topic is well-studied in many Western contexts, historical and contemporary, we still know little about the ways in which socioeconomic disparities and class identities were transmitted across subsequent generations of parents and children in the Ottoman Empire. In order to explore this issue in a sophisticated fashion, this article introduces quantitative techniques and categories of analysis tailored specifically for Ottoman sources. In addition to other findings, our analysis suggests that Kastamonu in the eighteenth century was vertically and horizontally segmented: Not only were there significant impediments to intergenerational mobility across privileged and underprivileged sectors of the society, such transitions were also infrequent across sub-groups within upper and lower classes. Despite a general lack of intergenerational fluidity at all socioeconomic levels, however, our calculations also reveal that the provincial elite were particularly immobile.
Year: 2011
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: History of the Family
Hulya Kuçuk: The Role of the Bektashis in Turkey's National Struggle. A Historical and Critical Study (Article)Title: Hulya Kuçuk: The Role of the Bektashis in Turkey's National Struggle. A Historical and Critical Study
Author: Dressler, Markus
Abstract: Dealing with the roles of the Bektashis in Turkey's recent history, especially in its National Struggle (1918-1923) as well as their situation in late 19th and early 20th centuries Ottoman Empire, this volume is packed with well documented historical information on individuals who belonged or claimed to belong to the Bektashi milieu, and contains many documents and several pictures hitherto unknown. It also treats the roles of the other Sufi orders in the National Struggle to emphasize its thesis that the Bektashis acted not differently during the National Struggle. It sheds lights on many unknown aspects of Turkey's National Struggle and brings new commentaries on Turkey's official policies regarding the Bektashis and Alevis.
Year: 2008
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Zeitschrift Der Deutschen Morgenla¨ndischen Gesellschaft
Publisher: Brill
Starting without Food: Fasting and the Early Mawlawi Order (Book Section)Title: Starting without Food: Fasting and the Early Mawlawi Order
Author: Nicolas Trepanier
Editor: Amy Singer
Abstract: Food is a marker of identity, culture, and class, and it denotes power, routine, leisure, and celebration. Despite its importance to every aspect of historical research, this topic has not been sufficiently explored in Ottoman history. This volume places the study of food in the mainstream of Ottoman history by analizing major issues--origins, identity, minorities, Ottomanization, the "golden age," foreign relations, the nature of modernity-- all from the perspective of food.
Year: 2011
Primary URL:
http://www.worldcat.org/title/starting-with-food-culinary-approaches-to-ottoman-history/oclc/457767120&referer=brief_resultsPrimary URL Description: WorldCat entry
Publisher: Markus Wiener Publishers
Book Title: Starting with Food: Culinary Approaches to Ottoman History
ISBN: 9781558765146
The Silent Informant: Discordant Narratives of Public History in Turkey (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: The Silent Informant: Discordant Narratives of Public History in Turkey
Author: Maureen Jackson
Abstract: Over 50 years after the “Thrace Events” in Turkey (1934) a Jewish émigré describes the violence he experienced: “For a certain time in all the part where we used to live, it start(ed): anti-semitism, and they want(ed) to kill all the Jewish people to deport them at that time in (1934). Hitler time. We escaped….” Remembering the boycotts and violence against Jews in Thrace through an arguably post-Holocaust narrative of Nazi anti-Semitism, this informant’s account contrasts sharply with recent scholarship forging a link between such local violence and the Settlement Law (also 1934) that reflected wider state security interests targeting not only Turkish Jews, but also Muslim minorities such as Balkan immigrants and Kurdish tribes in the east. Effectively silent about the Turkish state’s role in the violence, the informant draws attention to a normative public and scholarly narrative about Jews as protected minority in Turkey, as well as the association of anti-Jewish violence not with Turkey, but with Nazi Germany. What is significant about such divergent stories of the state and how can they illuminate historiographies that take shape and circulate in a variety of venues as ‘public history’? Drawing upon oral interviews with older Turkish Jews in Istanbul, Izmir and Edirne, this paper will explore the effective and real silences in their testimonies for what they can tell us about wider neighborhood, national and interethnic contexts, as well as the degree to which they undergird commonplace historiographies of the nation and academy.
Date: 12/04/2011
Primary URL:
http://mymesa.arizona.edu/meeting_program_abs.php?pid=62a0040fc7fe4498072d48693c870f3cPrimary URL Description: Meeting program, meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, November 2011, Washington, DC
Conference Name: Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting 2011
Crossing Musical Worlds: Ottoman Jewry, Music Making, and the Rise of the Nation (Article)Title: Crossing Musical Worlds: Ottoman Jewry, Music Making, and the Rise of the Nation
Author: Maureen Jackson
Abstract: Based on a larger project investigating music making as an integral part of Ottoman and Turkish social history, this article seeks to understand surviving musical resonances across ethnoreligious communities in Turkey today. It specifically explores Jewish religious music and its interconnections with a wider Ottoman-Turkish musical culture that has sustained historical traces in Turkish synagogues today. Focusing primarily on a Jewish musical form with close links to Ottoman court music, the Maftirim repertoire, the study investigates the changing urban landscape of intercommunal music making as the Ottoman Empire ended and the Turkish nation was built. Through composer biographies and ethnographic methodologies of oral history within an interdisciplinary theoretical approach, the analysis seeks to articulate the places and people circulating in a late Ottoman music world and sharing patterns of patronage, aesthetic understandings, professional specialization, and master-pupil relations. The social ethos of this art world provides the foundation for tracing Ottoman-Turkish-Jewish music making in the republic. By pursuing not only minority human and cultural losses in the twentieth century but also the musical lives of those Jews who remained in Turkey, the article elucidates continuities in Ottoman lines of transmission and interethnic music making to explain the performance of Maftirim in Istanbul today. It argues that it was through alternative patrons and civic spaces that Turkish Jewish religious musicians participated with their non-Jewish counterparts in sustaining at-risk, albeit changing, Ottoman cultural forms in the face of state and commercial cultural interests.
Year: 2011
Primary URL:
http://cssaame.dukejournals.org/gca?allch=&submit=Go&gca=ddcsa%3B31%2F3%2F569Primary URL Description: abstract as above
Access Model: subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East pp. 569-587
Publisher: Duke University Press
Prizes
AMS 75 PAYS Subventions
Date: 11/1/2011
Organization: American Musicological Society
Abstract: publication subvention award
Morisco Refugees‘ Relations with Venetian and French Trading and Diplomatic Communities in Istanbul, 1570s - early 1600s (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Morisco Refugees‘ Relations with Venetian and French Trading and Diplomatic Communities in Istanbul, 1570s - early 1600s
Author: Tijana Krstic
Abstract: presentation of preliminary archival research findings
Date: 2/18/2011
Primary URL:
http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/md/transculturality/programm.pdfPrimary URL Description: conference program
Secondary URL:
http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/transculturality/kaufmannsdiasporas_en.htmlSecondary URL Description: webpage of sponsoring research group
Conference Name: Union in Separation – Trading Diasporas in the Eastern Mediterranean (1200-1700)
On the Streets of Istanbul: The Moral Space of the City’s Marginals (1703-1839) (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: On the Streets of Istanbul: The Moral Space of the City’s Marginals (1703-1839)
Author: Shirine Hamadeh
Abstract: conference paper presented at the University of Crete and the Institute of Mediterranean Studies (Rethymno, Crete)
Date: 5/1/2010
Primary URL:
http://www.ims.forth.gr/index_main.php?c=27&l=e&d=1Primary URL Description: FORTH Institute for Mediterranean Studies, Programme of Turkish Studies
Conference Name: Halcyon Days in Crete
'On the tranquillity and repose of the sultan' : the construction of a topos (Book Section)Title: 'On the tranquillity and repose of the sultan' : the construction of a topos
Author: Hakan Karateke
Editor: Christine Woodhead
Abstract: The Ottoman empire as a political entity comprised most of the present Middle East (with the principal exception of Iran), north Africa and south-eastern Europe. For over 500 years, until its disintegration during World War I, it encompassed a diverse range of ethnic, religious and linguistic communities with varying political and cultural backgrounds. pp. 16-29
Yet, was there such a thing as an ‘Ottoman world’ beyond the principle of sultanic rule from Istanbul? Ottoman authority might have been established largely by military conquest, but how was it maintained for so long, over such distances and so many disparate societies? How did provincial regions relate to the imperial centre and what role was played in this by local elites? What did it mean in practice, for ordinary people, to be part of an ‘Ottoman world’?
Year: 2011
Primary URL:
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415444927/Primary URL Description: Publisher's webpage
Publisher: Routledge
Book Title: The Ottoman World
ISBN: 9780203142851
Late Ottoman and Early Republican Turkish Historical Writing (Book Section)Title: Late Ottoman and Early Republican Turkish Historical Writing
Author: Cemal Kafadar
Author: Hakan Karateke
Editor: Attila Pok
Editor: Stuart Macintyre
Editor: Juan Maiguashca
Abstract: Volume 4 of The Oxford History of Historical Writing offers essays by leading scholars on the writing of history globally from 1800 to 1945. Divided into four parts, it first covers the rise, consolidation, and crisis of European historical thought, and the professionalization and institutionalization of history. The chapters in Part Two analyze how historical scholarship connected to various European national traditions. Part Three considers the historical writing of Europe's 'Offspring': the United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Brazil, and Spanish South America. The concluding part is devoted to histories of non-European cultural traditions: China, Japan, India, South East Asia, Turkey, the Arab world, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Year: 2012
Primary URL:
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/HistoryOther/~~/dmlldz11c2EmY2k9OTc4MDE5OTUzMzA5MQ==Primary URL Description: publishers webpage
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Book Title: The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume 4: 1800-1945
ISBN: 978-0199533091
Sufis in Western Society: Global Networking and Locality (Book)Title: Sufis in Western Society: Global Networking and Locality
Editor: Britt Klinkhammer
Editor: Markus Dressler
Editor: Ron Geaves
Abstract: In recent years Sufism has undergone something of a revival as a spiritual alternative to other manifestations of Islam. This book investigates the development of Sufism in Western societies, with a regional focus on North America and Europe. Exploring a number of issues relating to the dynamic tensions between religious globalization processes and specific sacred localities, this book looks at the formation of Sufi movements that have migrated from their place of origin to become global religious networks.
Year: 2009
Primary URL:
http://www.worldcat.org/title/sufis-in-western-society-global-networking-and-locality/oclc/223867132&referer=brief_resultsPrimary URL Description: WorldCat entry
Publisher: Routledge
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 9780203883648
Pluralism and authenticity: Sufi paths in post-9/11 New York (Book Section)Title: Pluralism and authenticity: Sufi paths in post-9/11 New York
Author: Markus Dressler
Editor: Britt Klinkhammer
Editor: Markus Dressler
Editor: Ron Geaves
Abstract: chapter on contemporary Sufi identity and practice
Year: 2009
Primary URL:
http://www.worldcat.org/title/sufis-in-western-society-global-networking-and-locality/oclc/223867132&referer=brief_resultsPrimary URL Description: WorldCat entry
Publisher: Routledge
Book Title: Sufis in Western society : global networking and locality
ISBN: 9780203883648
Secularism and Religion-Making (Book)Title: Secularism and Religion-Making
Editor: Arvind Mandair
Editor: Markus Dressler
Abstract: This book conceives of "religion-making" broadly as the multiple ways in which social and cultural phenomena are configured and reconfigured within the matrix of a world-religion discourse that is historically and semantically rooted in particular Western and predominantly Christian experiences, knowledges, and institutions. It investigates how religion is universalized and certain ideas, social formations, and practices rendered "religious" are thus integrated in and subordinated to very particular - mostly liberal-secular - assumptions about the relationship between history, politics, and religion.
Year: 2011
Primary URL:
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/ReligionTheology/Theory/?view=usa&ci=9780199782949#Product_DetailsPrimary URL Description: publisher's webpage
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 978-0-19-97829
Making Religion through Secularist Legal Discourse: The Case of Turkish Alevism (Book Section)Title: Making Religion through Secularist Legal Discourse: The Case of Turkish Alevism
Author: Markus Dressler
Editor: Arvind Mandair
Editor: Markus Dressler
Abstract: Alevism in the world context of developing religions; volume introduction
Year: 2011
Primary URL:
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/ReligionTheology/Theory/?view=usa&sf=toc&ci=9780199782949Primary URL Description: publisher's webpage
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Book Title: Secularism and Religion-Making
ISBN: 978-0-19-97829
Public/Private Distinctions, the Alevi Question, and the Headscarf. Turkish Secularism Revisited (Book Section)Title: Public/Private Distinctions, the Alevi Question, and the Headscarf. Turkish Secularism Revisited
Author: Markus Dressler
Editor: Linell Cady
Editor: Elizabeth Shakman Hurd
Abstract: Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age explores the history and politics of secularism and the public role of religion in France, India, Turkey, and the United States. It interprets the varieties of secularism as a series of evolving and contested processes of defining and remaking religion, rather than a static solution to the challenges posed by religious and political difference. It features essays from leading scholars from across disciplines, secular and religious traditions, and regional expertise. The volume illustrates a new approach to the hotly contested relation between political authority and religious tradition.
Year: 2010
Primary URL:
http://www.palgraveconnect.com/pc/doifinder/10.1057/9780230106703Primary URL Description: publisher's webpage
Publisher: Palgrave
Book Title: Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age
ISBN: 9780230621244
The Religio-Secular Continuum. Reflections on the Religious Dimensions of Turkish Secularism (Book Section)Title: The Religio-Secular Continuum. Reflections on the Religious Dimensions of Turkish Secularism
Author: Markus Dressler
Editor: Mateo Taussig-Rubbo
Editor: Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
Editor: Robert A. Yelle
Abstract: This work gives special attention to the secularism of law, exploring how law became secular, the phenomenology of the legal secular, and the challenges that lingering religious formations and other aspects of globalization pose for modern law's self-understanding. Bringing together scholars with a variety of perspectives and orientations, it provides a deeper understanding of the interconnections between law and religion and the unexpected histories and anthropologies of legal secularism in a globalizing modernity.
Year: 2011
Primary URL:
http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=20272Primary URL Description: publisher's webpage
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Book Title: After Secular Law
ISBN: 9780804775366
Mixing Musics: Turkish Jewry and the Urban Landscape of a Sacred Song (Book)Title: Mixing Musics: Turkish Jewry and the Urban Landscape of a Sacred Song
Author: Maureen Jackson
Abstract: This book traces the mixing of musical forms and practices in Istanbul to illuminate multiethnic music-making and its transformations across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It focuses on the Jewish religious repertoire known as the Maftirim, which developed in parallel with "secular" Ottoman court music. Through memoirs, personal interviews, and new archival sources, the book explores areas often left out of those histories of the region that focus primarily on Jewish communities in isolation, political events and actors, or nationalizing narratives. Maureen Jackson foregrounds artistic interactivity, detailing the life-stories of musicians and their musical activities. Her book amply demonstrates the integration of Jewish musicians into a larger art world and traces continuities and ruptures in a nation-building era. Among its richly researched themes, the book explores the synagogue as a multifunctional venue within broader urban space; girls, women, and gender issues in an all-male performance practice; new technologies and oral transmission; and Ottoman musical reconstructions within Jewish life and cultural politics in Turkey today.
Year: 2013
Primary URL:
http://www.worldcat.org/title/mixing-musics-turkish-jewry-and-the-urban-landscape-of-a-sacred-song/oclc/818953149&referer=brief_resultsPrimary URL Description: Worldcat entry
Access Model: print book
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978080478015
Prizes
National Jewish Book Award in Sephardic Culture, 2013
Date: 3/5/2014
Organization: Jewish Book Council
Abstract: The National Jewish Book Awards have been presented annually since 1948 to authors of books of exceptional merit in a variety of Judaic subjects. The awards are designed to heighten awareness of outstanding books of Jewish interest published in the last year and
• to encourage the reading of worthwhile books
• to recognize authors of outstanding Jewish literature
• to stimulate others to further literary creativity
• to acknowledge original contributions to scholarship
These awards acknowledge the seminal importance of a particular work. There is a monetary award for each winning author. A public presentation recognizes the superior efforts made by the author and publisher in preparation of the winning piece of literature. In addition, there is publicity for the event and the individual awardees.
Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Book)Title: Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire
Author: Tijana Krstic
Abstract: This book explores how Ottoman Muslims and Christians understood the phenomenon of conversion to Islam from the 15th to the 17th centuries, when the Ottoman Empire was at the height of its power and conversions to Islam peaked. Because the Ottomans ruled over a large non-Muslim population and extended greater opportunities to converts than to native-born Muslims, conversion to Islam was a contentious subject for all communities, especially Muslims themselves. By producing narratives about conversion, Ottoman Muslim and Christian authors sought to define the boundaries and membership of their communities while promoting their own religious and political agendas. Krstic argues that the production and circulation of narratives about conversion to Islam was central to the articulation of Ottoman imperial identity and Sunni Muslim "orthodoxy" in the long 16th century.
Year: 2011
Primary URL:
http://www.worldcat.org/title/contested-conversions-to-islam-narratives-of-religious-change-in-the-early-modern-ottoman-empire/oclc/688559436&referer=brief_resultsPrimary URL Description: Worldcat entry
Access Model: print book
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780804773171
Database of Ottoman Inscriptions (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)Title: Database of Ottoman Inscriptions
Author: Hakan Karateke
Author: Hatice Aynur
Author: Kayoko Hayashi.
Abstract: The Database of Ottoman Inscriptions is a massive project that aims to develop a searchable digital database comprising information about, as well as transliterations and pictures of, all the Turkish, Arabic and Persian architectural inscriptions created in the Ottoman lands during Ottoman times.
Year: 2010
Primary URL:
http://www.ottomaninscriptions.com/index.htmlPrimary URL Description: access point for the Database of Ottoman Inscriptions
Access Model: open access
Mean Streets: Urban Order and Moral Space in Early Modern Istanbul (Article)Title: Mean Streets: Urban Order and Moral Space in Early Modern Istanbul
Author: Shirine Hamadeh
Abstract: This essay attempts to understand how order and disorder were conceived in Istanbul between 1720 and 1840, before urban matters began to acquire legal and institutional clarity following the Tanzimat reforms. It focuses on floating populations in whose lives the street played a significant role: beggars, bachelors, and prostitutes. It argues that the practices and languages of urban order that targeted these groups hinged on the belief that the regulation of space could produce a desired social and moral order in the city.
Year: 2012
Primary URL:
http://poj.peeters-leuven.be/content.php?url=article&id=2988852&journal_code=TURCPrimary URL Description: access to abstract and download
Access Model: subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Turcica: Revue d’études turques
Publisher: Peeters
Foodways and Daily Life in Medieval Anatolia: A New Social History (Book)Title: Foodways and Daily Life in Medieval Anatolia: A New Social History
Author: Nicolas Trepanier
Abstract: Bringing to life an overlooked aspect of the dawn of the Ottoman empire, this illuminating study uses the prism of food—from farming to mealtimes, religious rituals, and commerce—to understand how Anatolian society gave rise to a superpower.
Year: 2014
Primary URL:
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/876882942Primary URL Description: Worldcat entry
Secondary URL:
http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/books/trefooSecondary URL Description: University of Texas Press notice
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0292759299
Writing Religion: The Making of Turkish Alevi Islam (Book)Title: Writing Religion: The Making of Turkish Alevi Islam
Author: Markus Dressler
Abstract: Academic and political debates on the nature and the history of the Alevis of Turkey have since the early 20th century, within the politics of Ottoman/Turkish modernization and Turkish nation-building, been locked in discourses of religious and ethnic essence and homogeneity. Within these discourses, groups previously referred to as Kizilbas (“Redhead”) and regarded as heretics with no attention to their ethnicity, were renamed “Alevi” and marked as Turkish and “heterodox” Muslims. This book analyzes the process of this re-signification within the complex historical dynamics of the late Ottoman Empire, marked by the implosion of the ideal of Ottomanist pluralism, and the first years of the Turkish Republic, when the Kemalist nation builders developed and acted upon their vision of ethno-religious homogeneity. The first part of this book is genealogical, tracing the formation of the new concept of Alevism from the Kizilbashes’ encounter with Christian missionaries and other Westerners in the second half of the 19th century through the core phase of Turkish nation-building until the 1930s. It combines historical analysis with theoretical discussion of the role of modern discourses of religion in that process. Part II is dedicated to the religiography of the eminent Turkish historian Mehmed Fuad Köprülü, whose work was highly influential in the establishment of the modern concept of Alevism. Particular attention is given to his conceptualization of inner-Islamic difference and to the convergence of a Western religion concept and Islamic modernist thought in his approach to religion/Islam.
Year: 2013
Primary URL:
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/823380561Primary URL Description: Worldcat entry
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780199969401
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes
Turks Across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian-Ottoman Borderlands, 1856-1914 (Book)Title: Turks Across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian-Ottoman Borderlands, 1856-1914
Author: James Meyer
Abstract: Turks Across Empires tells the story of the pan-Turkists, a group of Muslim activists who became involved in a wave of revolutions taking place in Russia (1905), Iran (1906) and the Ottoman Empire (1908), particularly focussing on the activities of three men, Yusuf Akçura, Ismail Gasprinskii, and Ahmet Agaoglu, who were part of a circle of Muslim writers and activists from Russia that was formed in Istanbul during the Young Turk era (1908-1918). The volume demonstrates how theirs is part of a much larger history of trans-imperial Muslims, the Russian-Ottoman borderlands, and the late imperial age.
Year: 2014
Primary URL:
http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780198725145.doPrimary URL Description: Oxford University Press
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0198725145
The Precarious Intimacy of Honor in Late-Ottoman Accounts of Para-militarism and Banditry (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: The Precarious Intimacy of Honor in Late-Ottoman Accounts of Para-militarism and Banditry
Author: Tolga U. Esmer
Abstract: This essay sets up a dialogue between the self-narrative of an irregular cavalryman (deli) Deli Mustafa that recounts the campaigns he took part in between 1801/2 and 1825 and the corpus of Ottoman archival sources written about Kara Feyzi, an irregular soldier (sekbân) and bandit leader who marshaled a successful, trans-regional organized crime network that pillaged Ottoman Rumeli from 1793 to 1823. It does so in order to tell a larger story about how imperial governance came to depend on wide-spread networks of violence for defending and policing the Empire but became imbricated in their criminal activities during this period of Ottoman history. Together, Kara Feyzi and Deli Mustafa’s stories shed light on much larger interpretative and moral communities forged upon the same kinds of “texts,” narrative strategies, group experiences, exchange of material and symbolic resources, or simply a concept like honor woven throughout the narratives
Date: 04/25/2014
Primary URL:
http://ejts.revues.org/4873Primary URL Description: full text publication of conference paper
Conference Name: Men of Disorder Masculinity, Violence and Urban Networks in the Modern Middle East and Central Asia
The Challenge of Periodization: New Patterns in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Historiography (Book Section)Title: The Challenge of Periodization: New Patterns in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Historiography
Author: Hakan Karateke
Editor: Erdem Cipa
Editor: Emine Fetvaci
Abstract: Hakan Karateke conducts a close study of nineteenth-century Ottoman world histories and the changing attitudes those represent about history.
Year: 2013
Primary URL:
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/793571886Primary URL Description: Worldcat citation
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Book Title: Writing History at the Ottoman Court: Editing the Past, Fashioning the Future
ISBN: 9780253008572
Economies of Violence, Banditry and Governance in the Ottoman Empire Around 1800 (Article)Title: Economies of Violence, Banditry and Governance in the Ottoman Empire Around 1800
Author: Tolga U. Esmer
Abstract: On 28 June 1797, the governor of Rumeli (that is, the Ottoman Balkans), El-Hac Mustafa Pasa, reported to Sultan Selim III (r. 1789–1808) that the notorious bandit Kara Feyzi had attacked the retinue of a local notable, a certain Osman Usta, near the town of Çirmen (now Ormenio in Greece). Though Osman did not slay the bandit leader, he killed over thirty of his men, among whom were some of Kara Feyzi’s most trusted lieutenants. The uniqueness of this dispatch — one among hundreds of archival sources describing Ottoman officials’ encounters with this network of bandits — lies in the governor’s noting that this particular bandit risked his life in order to prevent Osman Usta from mutilating the bodies of his fallen comrades. Kara Feyzi and his men allegedly collected and burned the corpses of their slain followers in the house of an ‘infidel’ while under heavy fire in order to spare their severed heads from becoming symbols of the state’s victory over Kara Feyzi’s retinue. The governor concludes the dispatch by suggesting that the sultan should confer prestigious ceremonial robes, luxurious sable furs, as well as cash, weapons and supplies, upon Osman Usta and his men for the valour they displayed, even though Kara Feyzi denied them the physical ‘proof’ of their deeds usually required for securing such imperial benefaction.
This anecdote opens a window into the material, symbolic and moral economies of banditry in Ottoman society.
Year: 2014
Primary URL:
http://past.oxfordjournals.org/content/224/1/163.full.pdf+htmlPrimary URL Description: on-line access to journl article
Access Model: paywall
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Past and Present
Publisher: Oxford Journals
Moriscos in Ottoman Galata, 1609-1620s (Book Section)Title: Moriscos in Ottoman Galata, 1609-1620s
Author: Tijana Krstic
Editor: Mercedes García-Arenal
Editor: Gerard Wiegers
Abstract: This paper focuses on the Morisco community that established itself in Ottoman Galata after the Expulsion from Spain in 1609. It looks at what the Morisco refugees do once they arrived in Istanbul and how they integrated into their new environment. It considers the professional and political goals espoused by the immigrants and how they adapted to an Ottoman society that was increasingly concerned with Islamic orthodoxy. It aims to describe the role the Moriscos played in Ottoman imperial, religious and cultural politics, both in the Mediterranean and domestically, in the “age of confessionalization” of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.
Year: 2014
Primary URL:
http://www.brill.com/products/book/expulsion-moriscos-spainPrimary URL Description: book product details
Access Model: print
Publisher: Brill
Book Title: The Expulsion of Moriscos from Spain: a Mediterranean Diaspora
ISBN: 9789004259201
Contesting Subjecthood and Sovereignty in Ottoman Galata in the Age of Confessionalization: The Carazo Affair, 1613-1617 (Article)Title: Contesting Subjecthood and Sovereignty in Ottoman Galata in the Age of Confessionalization: The Carazo Affair, 1613-1617
Author: Tijana Krstic
Abstract: In the early 1610s, communities of diplomats and traders with the status of müste’min (foreign resident) in Ottoman Galata were put on alert by the concerted attempt of certain Ottoman officials, especially the kadi of Galata, to extract from them the harac—the tax typically paid only by the ?immis (non-Muslim subjects of the sultan).Interwoven into this legal and diplomatic crisis is another story that sheds an interesting light on the entire affair. In 1609 Spanish king Philip III proclaimed the expulsion of Moriscos—(forcibly) Christianized Spanish Muslims—from the Iberian peninsula, triggering a massive exodus of a large segment of population into North Africa, but also to Ottoman Constantinople, via France and Venice. Although Constantinople received a significantly smaller number of refugees than North African principalities under Ottoman suzerainty, the impact of the Morisco diaspora was disproportionally large. In Constantinople, the refugees were settled in Galata, in what appears to be a deliberate attempt by the Ottoman authorities to change the confessional make-up of this overtly non-Muslim section of the city. This is how the fierce economic and confessional competition among the local, already established trading and diplomatic communities and the newcomers began. The paper will reconstruct these competitive relationships on the basis of Ottoman, Venetian, and French contemporary sources by focusing on the incidents surrounding the attempted imposition of the harac on foreign residents and the attempted takeover of Galata churches by the Morisco refugees. It appears that the arrival of the Moriscos and familiarity with their plight in Spain prompted Ottoman officials to rethink the legal status and the notions of extra-territoriality in relation to religious identity in the Ottoman context as well.
Year: 2013
Primary URL:
http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/22138617-12340024Primary URL Description: access to article abstract and full text
Access Model: paywall
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Oriente Moderno
Publisher: Brill
The Selection Bias in Court Records: Settlement and Trial in Eighteenth Century Ottoman Kastamonu (Article)Title: The Selection Bias in Court Records: Settlement and Trial in Eighteenth Century Ottoman Kastamonu
Author: Bogac Ergene
Author: Metin Cosgel
Abstract: Court records are used extensively in historical research. Preserved as summaries of daily legal proceedings, they give historians a unique opportunity to access information about the names, characteristics, and socio-economic status of individuals and the laws, local customs, and legal institutions of societies. Although researchers have noted various limitations of these records, the problem of selection bias has not been systematically studied. Since litigants would probably settle disputes in which one side is likely to be a clear winner, the cases that go to trial are more likely to be the difficult and uncertain ones that comprise a non-random subset of all disputes. This article presents a study of selection bias in Ottoman courts in the town of Kastamonu in northern Anatolia, from the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Disputes are categorized by type and the distribution of court participants is studied according to composition, gender, and socio-religious status. A regression analysis is run to determine the factors affecting the likelihood of cases being tried in court. The results indicate that the cases that ended up in court were selected systematically. If the selection bias is ignored, research based on Ottoman court records may be seriously flawed in its ability to yield general conclusions.
Year: 2014
Primary URL:
http://www.ehs.org.uk/app/journal/issue/10.1111/ehr.2014.67.issue-2Primary URL Description: link to journal publication
Secondary URL:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0289.12029/fullSecondary URL Description: Wiley online library access
Access Model: restricted
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Economic History Review
Publisher: Economic History Society
'Law and Economics' Literature and Ottoman Legal Studies (Article)Title: 'Law and Economics' Literature and Ottoman Legal Studies
Author: Metin Cosgel
Author: Bogac Ergene
Abstract: This article considers the relevance of hypotheses developed in the "law and economics" literature regarding settlement/trial decisions in the Ottoman Empire. In particular, it explores the applicability of the "selection principle" and "50 percent plaintiff win-rate" formulated by George Priest and Benjamin Klein. The article also demonstrates how existing research based on Ottoman court records can contribute to the "law and economics" scholarship, which is dominated by research based on modern, Western contexts. The article utilizes the court records from eighteenth-century Kastamonu to make observations about settlement/litigation decisions in an Ottoman context.
Year: 2014
Primary URL:
http://web2.uconn.edu/economics/working/2013-02.pdfPrimary URL Description: full text .pdf download
Secondary URL:
http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/15685195/21/1-2Secondary URL Description: Brill online URL
Access Model: free access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Islamic Law and Society
Publisher: Brill
In and Out of Place: The Everyday Spaces of Istanbul’s Migrants, 1720-1840 (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: In and Out of Place: The Everyday Spaces of Istanbul’s Migrants, 1720-1840
Author: Shirine Hamadeh
Abstract: Dr. Shirine Hamadeh considered how Ottoman space, or spaces, were constructed through studies of 17th century Aleppo and 18th century Istanbul, respectively. She discussed how one could write early modern architectural and urban histories, when the existing sources have so few images representing architecture.
Date: 5/16/2014
Primary URL:
https://www.academia.edu/6837006/International_Conference_Announcement_-_Ottoman_Topologies_Spatial_Experience_in_an_Early_Modern_Empire_and_Beyond_Stanford_May_16-17_2014_Primary URL Description: conference announcement and schedule
Conference Name: Ottoman Topologies: Spatial Experience in an Early Modern Empire
Mapping Ottoman Inscriptions (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Mapping Ottoman Inscriptions
Author: Hakan Karateke
Abstract: Dr. Hakan Karateke uses the procedures and data from the project that he helps direct, the Ottoman Inscription Database, to discuss mapping language and its public presentation in the Ottoman realms.
Date: 5/17/2014
Primary URL:
http://shc.stanford.edu/events/ottoman-topologies-spatial-experience-early-modern-empire-and-beyondPrimary URL Description: Stanford University event announcement
Secondary URL:
https://networks.h-net.org/node/8051/discussions/25177/ottoman-topologies-spatial-experience-early-modern-empire-andSecondary URL Description: Publicity notice for Ottoman Topologies conference.
Conference Name: Ottoman Topologies: Spatial Experience in an Early Modern Empire
Landscape and the Subjective Experience of Place in Mediaeval Anatolia (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Landscape and the Subjective Experience of Place in Mediaeval Anatolia
Author: Nicolas Trepanier
Abstract: Dr. Nicolas Trepanier used his archival research to help analyze the political boundaries and definitions of the Avkat region in the medieval period, coincidentally mapping the stories and activities of the region's inhabitants.
Date: 5/16/2014
Primary URL:
http://shc.stanford.edu/events/ottoman-topologies-spatial-experience-early-modern-empire-and-beyondPrimary URL Description: Stanford University conference announcement
Secondary URL:
https://networks.h-net.org/node/8051/discussions/25177/ottoman-topologies-spatial-experience-early-modern-empire-andSecondary URL Description: Conference publicity, H-Mediterranean
Conference Name: Ottoman Topologies: Spatial Experience in an Early Modern Empire
Law and Legal Change in the Ottoman Empire during 17th and 18th Centuries (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Law and Legal Change in the Ottoman Empire during 17th and 18th Centuries
Author: Bogac Ergene
Abstract: Dr. Bogac Ergene explores how the Ottoman legal system, institutions, and practices changed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Recently, Ottoman historians have intensified their efforts to better understand the socioeconomic dynamics and fiscal-administrative structures of this period. Once considered to be an era of general decline and degeneration, now the prevalent tendency in the field is to characterize these two centuries as an era of major institutional transformation and adjustment to new circumstances. These novel attempts of interpretation are based on impressive archival research and nuanced considerations of the information that this effort has generated in social, political and economic history. However, the progress achieved in these areas has yet to be attained in legal history-writing. Broadly speaking Ottomanists have yet to provide a comprehensive depiction of the ways in which Ottoman law, legal institutions, and practices might have changed between 1600 and 1800. This paper represents a preliminary attempt in this general direction, by offering a critical survey of the available literature and considering how historians approached and discussed legal structures and practices during this period.
Date: 4/4/2014
Primary URL:
http://agakhanbrown.org/archive/program/Primary URL Description: Conference program and webcast link
Secondary URL:
http://watson.brown.edu/events/2014/sharia-government-and-developmentSecondary URL Description: Brown University Watson Institute conference publicity
Conference Name: Sharia, Government, and Development
Turkish Politics of Doxa: Otherizing the Alevis as Heterodox (Article)Title: Turkish Politics of Doxa: Otherizing the Alevis as Heterodox
Author: Markus Dressler
Abstract: The religious identity of Turkey’s Alevis, with the origins of their traditions, and in particular their
relation to Islam, are the focus of a debate current in Turkey as well as in those western European
countries with strong Turkish migrant populations. This debate began in the late 1980s, with the
public coming-out of the Alevi community, when the Alevis set out on a manifest campaign to be
recognized as a distinct cultural and/or religious tradition. Against the backdrop of this debate, this
article discusses the impact of Turkish politics of doxa on the possibilities of Alevi representation
in Turkey. It gives particular attention to the implication of secularism and nationalism in the
knowledge regime that subscribes heterodoxy to the Alevis – an ascription that secures their
principal integratability in the Turkish nation, while at the same time preparing the ground for
otherizing them from the Sunni majority perspective.
Year: 2015
Primary URL:
http://psc.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/01/09/0191453714567492.full.pdfPrimary URL Description: Link to article.
Access Model: open source
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Philosophy and Social Criticism
Publisher: Sage Journals
Historical Trajectories and Ambivalences of Turkish Minority Discourse (Article)Title: Historical Trajectories and Ambivalences of Turkish Minority Discourse
Author: Markus Dressler
Abstract: This article inquires into the work of modern minority discourse and politics that delineates the boundaries of the Turkish national subject as Turkish-Islamic. It argues that the Turkish minority concept, which is based on imaginaries that justify claims of national and religious sameness and difference, needs to be understood against the backdrop of its historical formation. In the late Ottoman Empire, the socio-political grounds of communal sameness/difference were radically transformed. In this process, ethno-religious millets turned into national millets, culminating in the re-conceptualization of the non-Muslim millets as religious minorities in the early Republic of Turkey. The article further shows how the restriction of minority rights to non-Muslims puts the Turkish concept of minority/azinlik at odds with international conventions on minority discourse. It creates ambivalences with regard to citizenship and nationhood status not only for them, but also for disadvantaged Muslim subgroups, such as the Alevis. Drawing in particular on the case of the Alevi community, I will demarcate the contested entry and exit points of nationhood and religion, in relation to which the minority label is organized in Turkey. Having to negotiate the pitfalls of Turkish identity discourses, Alevis employ the semantics of international human rights discourse in their quest for equal rights and recognition, while rejecting the minority label.
Year: 2015
Primary URL:
http://newdiversities.mmg.mpg.de/?page_id=1644Primary URL Description: Link to article.
Access Model: open source
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: New Diversities 17 (2015): Engaging with the Other: Religion, Identity, and Politics in the Mediterranean
Publisher: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity
Making the Case for a Quantitative and Economic Approach to Ottoman Legal History (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Making the Case for a Quantitative and Economic Approach to Ottoman Legal History
Abstract: This lecture considers the potential contributions of quantitative and economic approaches to Ottoman legal history. While historians have made some limited attempts to utilize quantitative techniques in order to explore Ottoman court records, almost nothing exists in Ottoman legal literature that resembles the "law and economics" scholarship that has emerged for Western settings. In this lecture, Ergene critically surveys the methodological discussions among Ottoman scholars pertaining to the applicability of quantitative techniques in legal research and also considers the applicability of insights associated with the "law and economics" scholarship to the Ottoman context.
Author: Bogac Ergene
Date: 4/3/2014
Location: Brown University, Watson Institute, Joukowsky Forum
Primary URL:
http://watson.brown.edu/events/2014/bogac-ergene-making-case-quantitative-and-economic-approach-ottoman-legal-historyPrimary URL Description: Lecture announcement.
The Assassin’s Perspective: Teaching History with Video Games (Article)Title: The Assassin’s Perspective: Teaching History with Video Games
Author: Nicolas Trepanier
Abstract: I know that many students come to college interested in history precisely because they’ve played historically themed video games. A course about the Crusades, the American Revolution, or the Napoleonic wars might sound especially interesting for one who has been there. As teachers of history, doesn’t that give us something to work with?
After designing and twice teaching a course about representations of history in video games, the historical inaccuracies of Napoleon: Total War or Civilization IV are as obvious to me as ever. But I also realize that, even more than I expected, using video games is a very efficient way to let undergraduates engage with historiography and leave them with a sophisticated, critical perspective that is likely to remain alive long after they graduate.
Year: 2014
Primary URL:
https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/may-2014/the-assassins-perspectivePrimary URL Description: Link to article.
Access Model: open source
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Perspectives on History
Publisher: American Historical Association
The Ottoman Official Gazette Taqvim-i Veqayi, 1831: An Ottoman Annal in its Own Right (Book Section)Title: The Ottoman Official Gazette Taqvim-i Veqayi, 1831: An Ottoman Annal in its Own Right
Author: Hakan Karateke
Editor: Gary Leiser
Editor: William Hickman
Abstract: The Ottoman term for a historical work, tarih, can sometimes be misleading to students of history. Modern scholarship replicates the Ottoman use of the term and regards virtually all works with narratives of events as 'history;' little distinction is made between the various types of Ottoman historical writing. Yet, from a modern perspective used to modern definitions and taxonomies within the discipline of history, seeing the label applied to a variety of Ottoman historical productions is confusing, both with regard to the topics, and to the time period that they cover. To the modern mind, pamphlets and monographs justifying a political position, glorifying campaigns, eulogizing statesmen, or investigating controversial current events would be regarded as reportage, propaganda, political analysis, or some combination thereof. The Ottoman mind, however, classified all such works under the rubric of history. A closer look to better understand the array of Ottoman historical works will not only illuminate us with regard to the Ottoman conceptions of historiography, but also allow us to conduct an adequate analysis of the contents of Ottoman histories.
Year: 2015
Primary URL:
https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138808188Primary URL Description: Book presentation
Access Model: print
Publisher: Routledge
Book Title: Turkish Language, Literature, and History: Travelers’ Tales, Sultans, and Scholars since the Eighth Century
ISBN: 978-1138808188
The Politics of Translation: Two Stories from the Turkish "Ferec ba'de Sidde" in "Les mille et une nuit, contes arabes" (Article)Title: The Politics of Translation: Two Stories from the Turkish "Ferec ba'de Sidde" in "Les mille et une nuit, contes arabes"
Author: Hakan Karateke
Abstract: The ninth volume of Antoine Galland’s (d. 1715) French translation of "Les mille et une nuit, contes arabes," the collection of stories that would later be known in English as the Arabian Nights, begins with a one-and-a-half-page Avertissement. Apparently written by Galland or at his behest, the notice announces that the final two stories of the previous volume, which had been published some three years previous, were not actually part of the Arabian Nights. Rather, these stories were “inserted and published” without the knowledge of the translator, who learned about the addition only after the volume appeared on the market. Galland would mention the event in his Journal, calling it “the affair of the eighth volume” (l’affair du huitieme tome des mille et une nuit) in his entry for December 20, 1708.
This interpolation at the end of the eighth volume of the Arabian Nights has been touched upon by scholars, although not treated at length. This paper first outlines and contextualizes the events leading up to the publication. Subsequently, I look closely at the translations of these stories, which are now known indeed not to be taken from the Arabian Nights, but from a Turkish collection of stories called the "Ferec ba?de Sidde." Finally, I attempt to analyze these translations and contextualize them within the larger discipline of translation studies.
Year: 2015
Primary URL:
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/682237Primary URL Description: Link to article.
Access Model: open source
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: The Journal of Near Eastern Studies
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
The Elusive Intermediaries: Moriscos in Ottoman and Western European Diplomatic Sources from Constantinople, 1570s-1630s (Article)Title: The Elusive Intermediaries: Moriscos in Ottoman and Western European Diplomatic Sources from Constantinople, 1570s-1630s
Author: Tijana Krstic
Abstract: Although the role of Moriscos in the diplomacy of North African Muslim polities has long been recognized, next to nothing is known of their contribution to Ottoman diplomacy. Yet, during the sixteenth century, and especially after their expulsion from Spain in 1609, Constantinople became an important node in the Moriscos’ Mediterranean-wide network. Unlike other intermediaries active on the diplomatic scene of Constantinople, Moriscos had a special role in sultanic image-making during the age of increased confessional polarization in both Europe and parts of the Middle East, between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. The essay examines how European and Ottoman sources represented Moriscos as both subjects and objects of Ottoman diplomacy, explores the significance of their religious affiliation in the diplomatic process, and argues that the Moriscos’ mediation provided the Ottomans with valuable opportunities to exploit confessional tensions and articulate their claims to sovereignty to their European interlocutors.
Year: 2015
Primary URL:
http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/15700658-12342454Primary URL Description: Link to article.
Access Model: open source
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of Early Modern History
Publisher: Brill
Reading Abdallah b. Abdallah al-Tarjuman’s Tuhfa (1420) in the Ottoman Empire: Muslim-Christian Polemics and Intertextuality in the Age of Confessionalization (Article)Title: Reading Abdallah b. Abdallah al-Tarjuman’s Tuhfa (1420) in the Ottoman Empire: Muslim-Christian Polemics and Intertextuality in the Age of Confessionalization
Author: Tijana Krstic
Abstract: In 1604, a charismatic Sufi sheikh from Tunis commissioned the translation into Ottoman Turkish of Abdallah b. Abdallah al Tarjuman’s polemical text entitled Tu?fat al-Adib fi al-radd ?ala ahl al-?alib (1420), with the intention of presenting it to Ottoman Sultan Ahmed I. Soon after, this text became one of the most widely known and disseminated anti-Christian polemical texts in the Islamic world, and by the late nineteenth century, in Europe as well. The article examines the circumstances of Tu?fa’s translation from Arabic into Ottoman Turkish, the actors involved, the narrative’s trajectory from Tunis to Istanbul, its reception by the Ottoman reading public, as well as impact on the development of an Ottoman polemical genre of self-narrative of conversion to Islam. Transcription and translation of such an Ottoman narrative, which appears to have been directly influenced by Tu?fa, is featured in the article’s appendix. By focusing on the trajectory of a single text belonging to the genre of religious polemics, the article bridges the traditionally disconnected academic discussions pertaining to the early modern Iberian, North African and Ottoman history and demonstrates their inherent connectivity in the age of confessional polarization (16th-17th centuries).
Year: 2015
Primary URL:
http://al-qantara.revistas.csic.es/index.php/al-qantara/article/view/349/341Primary URL Description: Link to article.
Access Model: open source
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Al Qantara
Publisher: Instituto de Lenguas y Culturas del Mediterráneo y Oriente Próximo (ILC) Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales (CCHS) CSIC, Madrid
Ottoman History Podcast no. 185, Turks Across Empires (Radio/Audio Broadcast or Recording)Title: Ottoman History Podcast no. 185, Turks Across Empires
Writer: James H. Meyer
Writer: Nir Shafir
Writer: Ella Fratantuono
Director: Chris Gratien
Producer: Chris Gratien
Abstract: Pan-Turkism rose to prominence as a political ideology during the early twentieth century, heavily influenced by Muslim intellectuals that traveled between the Russian and Ottoman spheres. For many of these figures such as Yusuf Akçura, Ismail Gasprinski, and Ahmet Agaoglu, Pan-Turkism became the political movement that defined their legacies. However, as James Meyer explains in his new monograph entitled Turks Across Empires, these intellectuals engaged with numerous other issues of the period well before becoming the Pan-Turkists they are remembered as today. In this episode, Nir Shafir and Ella Fratantuono talk to James Meyer about this research and explore what the history of the Pan-Turkists tells us about the broader sociopolitical connections between Russia and the Ottoman Empire.
Date: 02/14/2015
Primary URL:
http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2015/02/turks-across-empires.htmlPrimary URL Description: link to podcast abstract and recording
Access Model: open source
Format: Web
Ottoman History Podcast no. 233, Foodways in Medieval Anatolia (Radio/Audio Broadcast or Recording)Title: Ottoman History Podcast no. 233, Foodways in Medieval Anatolia
Writer: Nicolas Trepanier
Writer: Nir Shafir
Writer: Polina Ivanova
Director: Chris Gratien
Producer: Chris Gratien
Abstract: At the heart of medieval political economies were a variety of practices, structures, and activities that revolved around the production and distribution of food. In this episode, Nicolas Trépanier discusses his research for Foodways and Daily Life in Medieval Anatolia, which examines life in the early Ottoman Empire through the lens of food and drink. We discuss diverse subjects from agrarian labor and temporality to religion and commerce in order to understand how people lived through what and how they ate.
Date: 03/23/2016
Primary URL:
http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2016/03/food-medieval-anatolia.htmlPrimary URL Description: link to podcast abstract and recording
Access Model: open source
Format: Web
Ottoman History Podcast no. 239, Economics and Justice in the Ottoman Courts (Radio/Audio Broadcast or Recording)Title: Ottoman History Podcast no. 239, Economics and Justice in the Ottoman Courts
Writer: Nir Shafir
Writer: Bogac Ergene
Director: Chris Gratien
Producer: Chris Gratien
Abstract: Were Ottoman courts just? Bogaç Ergene discusses this basic question in this podcast by forging a new path beyond the earlier views of the justice system as inherently fickle and capricious - immortalized in Weber’s concept of kadijustiz - and the idealistic views of Ottoman courts as a site of equal and fair treatment for all. Drawing on the results of research for his forthcoming publication with Metin Cosgel entitled The Economics of Ottoman Justice, Ergene argues for employing the quantitative methods of “law and economics” scholars, demonstrating that entrenched power holders in early modern Ottoman society were always able to use the Ottoman court system to produce outcomes favorable to themselves.
Date: 04/11/2016
Primary URL:
http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2016/04/economics-and-justice-in-ottoman-courts.htmlPrimary URL Description: link to podcast abstract and recording
Access Model: open source
Format: Web
A Mediterranean Network: Spanish Moriscos in the Ottoman Empire and Beyond, 1570s-1640s (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: A Mediterranean Network: Spanish Moriscos in the Ottoman Empire and Beyond, 1570s-1640s
Abstract: Discussion of Tijana Krstic's archival research on the return of Spanish Muslims to Istanbul.
Author: Tijana Krstic
Date: 5/10/2010
Location: ARIT Istanbul Center
Staging Harmony: One Minority Community in Ottoman Cultural Revivals Today (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Staging Harmony: One Minority Community in Ottoman Cultural Revivals Today
Abstract: Discussion of ethnic groups in Izmir reconnecting and recalling former musical relationships in the Ottoman period.
Author: Maureen Jackson
Date: 12/14/2009
Location: ARIT Istanbul Center
Marketing Modern Identity in the Late Imperial Era: Yusuf Akçura and Ahmet Agaoglu in Russia and the Ottoman Empire (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Marketing Modern Identity in the Late Imperial Era: Yusuf Akçura and Ahmet Agaoglu in Russia and the Ottoman Empire
Abstract: Discussion of prominent Turkish-Azerbaijani leaders who championed a pan-Turkic ideology.
Author: James H. Meyer
Date: 11/3/2008
Location: ARIT Istanbul Center
Belly, Soul, and Neighbors: Food and Religious Identity in Medieval Anatolia (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Belly, Soul, and Neighbors: Food and Religious Identity in Medieval Anatolia
Abstract: Discussion of Nicolas Trepanier's archival research into the role food played in daily lives of ordinary people in Medieval Turkey – from agricultural production to religious fasting, and from commercial exchanges to meal schedules.
Author: Nicolas Trepanier
Date: 10/28/2008
Location: ARIT Istanbul Center
The Economics of Ottoman Justice: Settlement and Trial in the Sharia Courts (Book)Title: The Economics of Ottoman Justice: Settlement and Trial in the Sharia Courts
Author: Metin Cosgel
Author: Bogac Ergene
Abstract: During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire endured long periods of warfare, facing intense financial pressures and new international mercantile and monetary trends. The Empire also experienced major political-administrative restructuring and socioeconomic transformations. In the context of this tumultuous change, The Economics of Ottoman Justice examines Ottoman legal practices and the sharia court's operations to reflect on the judicial system and provincial relationships. Metin Cosgel and Bogaç Ergene provide a systematic depiction of socio-legal interactions, identifying how different social, economic, gender and religious groups used the court, how they settled their disputes, and which factors contributed to their success at trial. Using an economic approach, Cosgel and Ergene offer rare insights into the role of power differences in judicial interactions, the reproduction of communal hierarchies in court, and demonstrate how court use patterns changed over time.
Year: 2016
Primary URL:
http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9781107157637Primary URL Description: Publisher's page
Access Model: hardback book
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Multi-author monograph
ISBN: 1107157633
Economics and Justice in the Ottoman Courts (Radio/Audio Broadcast or Recording)Title: Economics and Justice in the Ottoman Courts
Writer: Bogac Ergene
Director: Chris Gratien
Producer: Chris Gratien
Abstract: Were Ottoman courts just? Bogaç Ergene discusses this basic question in this podcast by forging a new path beyond the earlier views of the justice system as inherently fickle and capricious—immortalized in Weber’s concept of kadijustiz—and the idealistic views of Ottoman courts as a site of equal and fair treatment for all. Drawing on the results of research for his forthcoming publication with Metin Cosgel entitled The Economics of Ottoman Justice, Ergene argues for employing the quantitative methods of “law and economics” scholars, demonstrating that entrenched power holders in early modern Ottoman society were always able to use the Ottoman court system to produce outcomes favorable to themselves.
Date: 04/11/2016
Primary URL:
http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2016/04/economics-and-justice-in-ottoman-courts.htmlPrimary URL Description: link to podcast access at Ottoman History Podcast 239
Access Model: open access
Format: Web
Historical Trajectories and Ambivalences of Turkish Minority Discourse (Article)Title: Historical Trajectories and Ambivalences of Turkish Minority Discourse
Author: Markus Dressler
Abstract: This article inquires into the work of modern minority discourse and politics that delineates the boundaries of the Turkish national subject as Turkish-Islamic. It argues that the Turkish minority concept, which is based on imaginaries that justify claims of national and religious sameness and difference, needs to be understood against the backdrop of its historical formation. In the late Ottoman Empire, the socio-political grounds of communal sameness/difference were radically transformed. In this process, ethno-religious millets turned into national millets, culminating in the re-conceptualization of the non-Muslim millets as religious minorities in the early Republic of Turkey. The article further shows how the restriction of minority rights to non-Muslims puts the Turkish concept of minority/azinlik at odds with international conventions on minority discourse. It creates ambivalences with regard to citizenship and nationhood status not only for them, but also for disadvantaged Muslim subgroups, such as the Alevis. Drawing in particular on the case of the Alevi community, I will demarcate the contested entry and exit points of nationhood and religion, in relation to which the minority label is organized in Turkey. Having to negotiate the pitfalls of Turkish identity discourses, Alevis employ the semantics of international human rights discourse in their quest for equal rights and recognition, while rejecting the minority label.
Year: 2015
Primary URL:
http://newdiversities.mmg.mpg.de/?page_id=1644Primary URL Description: on-line journal access, New Diversities
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Brass Bands, Jewish Youth, and the Sonorities of a Global Perspective (Article)Title: Brass Bands, Jewish Youth, and the Sonorities of a Global Perspective
Author: Maureen Jackson
Abstract: For the Ottoman Sultan Abdulmecid on tour, brass bands, imperial guards, girls with bouquets, and children from all local religious communities lined avenues to perform for him. Jackson tells the story of late Ottoman Jewish bands, their origins, communities, music, and performances, and of how they accessed performative avenues to leadership as a non-Muslim minority.
Year: 2016
Primary URL:
http://perspectives.ajsnet.org/sound-issue/sonorities-global-perspective/Primary URL Description: Journal article and audio links.
Access Model: full-text with audio
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: AJS Perespectives
Publisher: Association for Jewish Studies
Notes on a Scandal: Transregional Networks of Violence, Gossip, and Imperial Sovereignty in the Late Eighteenth Century Ottoman Empire (Article)Title: Notes on a Scandal: Transregional Networks of Violence, Gossip, and Imperial Sovereignty in the Late Eighteenth Century Ottoman Empire
Author: Tolga Esmer
Abstract: This essay reconstructs a scandal in the fall of 1797 involving Ottoman governors, leaders of a notorious network of irregular soldiers cum bandits, and residents of the city of Filibe (Plovdiv in Bulgaria). The scandal escalated into a crisis in which the large armies of the governors of Anatolia and Rumeli (the Ottoman Balkans) verged on clashing because each wanted to lead the state's lucrative war against Rumeli bandit networks. Imperial administrators issued dispatches regarding this scandal that were based on gossip and rumor circulating within the general population as well as among bandits. I draw on understandings of gossip as a social and cultural resource from linguistic anthropology to make sense of Ottoman political culture. I analyze these dispatches to uncover how the performance of these informal scripts featured prominently in correspondence with the Imperial Council and related surveillance reports, and thereby mediated resources, power, and authority among different agents of imperial violence. I show that gossip, rumor, and related forms of seemingly informal “talk” played a fundamental role in sovereign decision making. I also transpose methodologies and approaches of “history from below,” conceived by earlier generations of cultural anthropologists and historians, onto elite letters to ask new questions about information brokerage, the negotiation of power among different agents of imperial violence and their interlocutors, and the contested nature of imperial intelligence gathering and sovereignty.
Year: 2016
Primary URL:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/comparative-studies-in-society-and-history/article/notes-on-a-scandal-transregional-networks-of-violence-gossip-and-imperial-sovereignty-in-the-late-eighteenthcentury-ottoman-empire/50253633A1D238E3329377A7342C2CF0/Primary URL Description: article access online
Access Model: Cambridge Core
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Comparative Studies in Society and History
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Invisible City: Istanbul’s Migrants and the Politics of Space (Article)Title: Invisible City: Istanbul’s Migrants and the Politics of Space
Author: Shirine Hamadeh
Abstract: This paper takes Istanbul’s substantial population of migrant-bachelors (bekâr) as vantage point to address urban space and foreground everyday spatial agency. Working from police and judicial case records, state documents, and narrative accounts, I show that despite their increasingly regulated exclusion from the city’s dominant spaces of economy and residence, bachelors’ agency in the politics of urban space was pervasive, and galvanized by everyday acts of resistance against their peripheralization. These acts, which ranged from intrusive and violent to seemingly insignificant, amounted to creative or subversive forms of engagement with the spatial opportunities and social networks available to them.
Year: 2017
Primary URL: 10.1353/ecs.2017.0002
Primary URL Description: on-line access through ProjectMUSE
Access Model: print and on-liine
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Eighteenth-Century Studies
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
The Ottoman World: A Cultural History Reader, 1450–1700 (Book)Title: The Ottoman World: A Cultural History Reader, 1450–1700
Editor: Helga Anetshofer
Editor: Hakan Karateke
Abstract: The Ottoman lands, which extended from modern Hungary to the Arabian peninsula, were home to a vast population with a rich variety of cultures. The Ottoman World is the first primary source reader to bring a wide and diverse set of voices across Ottoman society into the classroom. Written in many languages—not only Ottoman Turkish but also Arabic, Armenian, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, and Persian—these texts, here translated, span the extent of the early modern Ottoman empire, from the 1450s to 1700.
Instructors are supplied with narratives conveying the lived experiences of individuals through texts that highlight human variety and accelerate a trend away from a state-centric approach to Ottoman history. In addition, samples from court registers, legends, biographical accounts, hagiographies, short stories, witty anecdotes, jokes, and lampoons provide exciting glimpses into popular mindsets in Ottoman society. By reflecting new directions in the scholarship with an innovative choice of texts, this collection provides a vital resource for teachers and students.
Year: 2021
Primary URL:
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520303454/the-ottoman-world#about-bookPrimary URL Description: publisher's presentation
Access Model: book
Publisher: University of California Press
Type: Edited Volume
Type: Translation
ISBN: 9780520303454
Copy sent to NEH?: No
A Companion to Early Modern Istanbul (Book)Title: A Companion to Early Modern Istanbul
Author: Cigdem Kafescioglu
Author: Shirine Hamadeh
Abstract: This multi-disciplinary volume is the first collective effort to explore Istanbul, capital of the vast polyglot, multiethnic, and multireligious Ottoman empire and home to one of the world’s largest and most diverse urban populations, as an early modern metropolis.
It assembles topics seldom treated together and embraces novel subjects and fresh approaches to older debates. Contributors crisscross the socioeconomic, political, cultural, environmental, and spatial, to examine the myriad human and non-human actors, local and global, that shaped the city into one of the key sites of early modern urbanity.
Year: 2021
Primary URL:
https://brill.com/view/title/59196Primary URL Description: publisher's presentation
Access Model: book
Publisher: Brill
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 9789004444928
Copy sent to NEH?: No