Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire - Hardcover

Krstic, Tijana

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804773173 ISBN 13: 9780804773171

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

This book explores how Ottoman Muslims and Christians understood the phenomenon of conversion to Islam from the 15th to the 17th centuries. The Ottomans ruled over a large non-Muslim population and conversion to Islam was a contentious subject for all communities, especially Muslims themselves. Ottoman Muslim and Christian authors sought to define the boundaries and membership of their communities while promoting their own religious and political agendas. Tijana 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.

Placing the evolution of Ottoman attitudes toward conversion and converts in the broader context of Mediterranean-wide religious trends and the Ottoman rivalry with the Habsburgs and Safavids, Contested Conversions to Islam draws on a variety of sources, including first-person conversion narratives and Orthodox Christian neomartyologies, to reveal the interplay of individual, (inter)communal, local, and imperial initiatives that influenced the process of conversion.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Tijana Krstic is Associate Professor in the Medieval Studies Department at Central European University in Budapest.

Tijana Krstic is Associate Professor in the Medieval Studies Department at Central European University in Budapest.

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Contested Conversions to Islam

Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman EmpireBy Tijana Krstic

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7317-1

Contents

Acknowledgments...............................................................................................................................................................................ixNote on Transliteration and Pronunciation.....................................................................................................................................................xiiiINTRODUCTION Turning "Rumi": Conversion to Islam, Fashioning of the Ottoman Imperial Ideology, and Interconfessional Relations in the Early Modern Mediterranean Context.....................1CHAPTER ONE Muslims through Narratives: Textual Repertoires of Fifteenth-Century Ottoman Islam and Formation of the Ottoman Interpretative Communities.......................................26CHAPTER THREE In Expectation of the Messiah: Interimperial Rivalry, Apocalypse, and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Muslim Polemical Narratives..............................................75CHAPTER FOUR Illuminated by the Light of Islam and the Glory of the Ottoman Sultanate: Self-Narratives of Conversion to Islam in the Age of Confessionalization..............................98CHAPTER FIVE Between the Turban and the Papal Tiara: Orthodox Christian Neomartyrs and Their Impresarios in the Age of Confessionalization...................................................121CHAPTER SIX Everyday Communal Politics of Coexistence and Orthodox Christian Martyrdom: A Dialogue of Sources and Gender Regimes in the Age of Confessionalization...........................143CONCLUSION Conversion and Confessionalization in the Ottoman Empire: Considerations for Future Research......................................................................................165Notes.........................................................................................................................................................................................175Bibliography..................................................................................................................................................................................217Index.........................................................................................................................................................................................253

Chapter One

Muslims through Narratives

Textual Repertoires of Fifteenth-Century Ottoman Islam and Formation of the Ottoman Interpretative Communities

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Sometime around 1403 Kutbeddin Mehmed Izniki (d. 1418), an Ottoman scholar from Iznik, wrote the work Mukaddime (The Introduction)—one of the earliest, if not the first, manuals of faith ('ilm-i hal) in Ottoman Turkish. As its title suggests, Mukaddime aspired to be a comprehensive introduction to Islam and gained considerable popularity in the ensuing decades, so much so that in 1458 a copy was prepared for the imperial library at the express wish of Sultan Mehmed II (r. 1451–83), and some early sixteenth-century converts singled it out as the key text that guided them in acquiring their knowledge of Islam. In the customary introduction where the author states the reasons for composing the work (sebeb-i te'lif), Izniki relates:

This poor one saw that there are fine and beautiful books on compulsory religious duties [farz-i 'ayn] but only in Arabic and Persian, and that many people cannot understand their meaning or if they can, they soon forget and cannot relate what they learned. For that reason this poor one wished to compose an introduction to the knowledge of obligatory duties in Turkish, so that it is read to the novices [mübtedi] and to the boys and girls who are about to reach maturity until they retain the commands of the law in their hearts and beliefs ... and after they come of age they act accordingly.

Izniki's sebeb-i te'lif presents an interesting snapshot of the Ottoman Muslim community in the early 1400s. It conjures up a developing community striving to meet the needs of the new believers, both novices in faith and the young, but lacking religious literature in the language of its congregants. Izniki's remarks remind the student of Ottoman history of a simple fact that is often forgotten: the development of Ottoman Islam has a history of its own, and this history unfolded parallel to the foundation of the Ottoman polity and Islamization of the domains that came under its rule.

This chapter explores the phenomenon of Islamization or the process by which the religious tradition of Islam became a major factor within the early Ottoman polity by focusing on the production and dissemination of early Ottoman texts seeking to instruct its readers and listeners how to become pious Muslims. These texts ranged from more formal catechetical works such as 'ilm-i hals to hagiographies of holy men to various other genres of dogmatic ('akaid) literature. Islamization in the early Ottoman Empire was informed by unique political and spiritual currents emanating from thirteenth-century Anatolia—the search for alternative political and religious means of legitimization in the wake of the Mongol destruction of the Abbasid caliphate (1258) and the intellectual and spiritual legacy of the great Sufi master and systematizer of Sufi thought, Ibn Arabi. Furthermore, the processes of Islamization and foundation of Ottoman Muslim communities cannot be fully understood without taking into consideration the competing political and religious agendas that marked the formation of the Ottoman polity in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The concept of interpretative communities is central to the ensuing discussion. The spread of Islam in the Ottoman domains entailed the formation of multiple "textual" or interpretative communities—microsocieties organized around common understanding of a "text." However, this text did not necessarily have to be a literary artifact—it could also be a group experience (such as participation in the conquest of Rumeli), an individual life story (such as the lives of warriors and saints), or simply a term. The participants in a community shared views and experiences, which allowed them to coalesce around particular texts and determine their meaning and practical implications. The process of the formation of these communities, which constantly evolved and changed form over time around particular texts, accounted for diversity within Ottoman Islam.

By focusing on the concept of a textual or interpretative community, it is possible to break down the distinction between oral and written modes of communication and bring listeners into the realm of written texts. The relationship between the written and spoken registers in Ottoman society was complex and dialectic because the two registers existed side by side rather than developed one after the other in an evolutionary manner. As a cultural milieu with restricted literacy and where the printing press (for texts in Arabic script) started being used only in the eighteenth century, Ottoman society placed a special importance on the public performance of written texts as a means of disseminating information to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804773173
• ISBN 13: 9780804773171
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 264
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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