Tijana Krstic | Central European University (original) (raw)
Books by Tijana Krstic
Entangled Confessionalizations? Dialogic Perspectives on the Politics of Piety and Community-Building in the Ottoman Empire, 15th-18th Centuries, 2022
Historicizing Sunni Islam in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1450 c. 1750, edited by T. Krstic and D. Terzioglu (Brill), 2020
This book explores how Ottoman Muslims and Christians understood the phenomenon of conversion to ... more 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.
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 also introduces new sources, such as 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
Papers by Tijana Krstic
“Buyurdum ki….” – The Whole World of Ottomanica and Beyond (Studies in Honour of Claudia Römer), edited by Hülya Çelik, Yavuz Köse, and Gisela Procházka-Eisl, 2023
This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
Entangled Confessionalizations? , 2022
Thus, Ismaʿil Sofi came to Persia, conquered it, so that the faith that first his father had taug... more Thus, Ismaʿil Sofi came to Persia, conquered it, so that the faith that first his father had taught, spread in all those lands. It had started in 1499. Short time later Luther emerged too and started sowing the seeds of his pernicious and infamous heresy in the German lands. And it is truly an astonishing thing, that at the time when among the Mohammedans the heresy of Haydar [Safavid shah Ismaʿil's father] arose, at the same time the heresy of Luther arose among the Christians. And not only in our own hemisphere, of both West and East, heresies emerged at the same time, but also in the southern hemisphere, in the New Indies, where many people abandoned their old religion and believed in Christ. Thus, at the same period everywhere occurred some kind of change in faith. Paolo Giovio, Historiarum sui temporis I (1550) This observation of the Catholic bishop and historian Paolo Giovio (d. 1552), made in the mid-sixteenth century, evidently rang true to the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, Nektarios (d. 1676), who repeated it verbatim in his own Compendium of Sacred World Histories (1677), written at St. Catherine's Monastery in Sinai more than a century later. 1 They both seem to have been of the opinion that the early sixteenth I would like to thank
Historicizing Sunni Islam in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1450-c. 1750, edited by T. Krstic and D. Terzioglu, 2020
Although still far from providing a comprehensive picture, recent research on Islamic theology in... more Although still far from providing a comprehensive picture, recent research on Islamic theology in post-fourteenth-century Central Asia as well as the Ottoman and Safavid realms has challenged the long-established view that in the "postclassical" era, and especially in these regions, the works on kalām became repetitive and derivative at best, or that the discipline experienced a complete demise, at worst.1 This view has long obfuscated new directions and tendencies in later kalām, often articulated in neglected glosses, commentaries, and supercommentaries on the works of older masters, which offer plentiful evidence of what Khaled El-Rouayheb has identified as new "textualphilological methodologies" through which scholars engaged with past works and arguments, not with the purpose of blindly imitating (taqlīd) but elaborating and/or independently verifying them (taḥqīq).2 Reflecting on recent efflorescence in research on early modern Islamic intellectual history, Matthew Melvin-Khoushki observed that unlike their European contemporaries who famously insisted on going back to and emulating the ancients, Ottoman scholars were perfectly content to textually inherit ancient learning through the "well-burnished prism" of their immediate Timurid, Turkmen, and Mamluk scholarly predecessors. Nevertheless, both Islamic and European scholars engaged in translating, commenting on, refining, critiquing, rejecting, subverting, and editing their intellectual patrimony-practices that Melvin-Khoushki groups under the broad rubric of taḥqīq, or verification through independent reasoning-which, he suggests, constituted "a new epistemic style that is distinctively early modern."3 1 For a critical overview of this stance as well as decline narratives that converged on the Ottoman period, see El-Rouayheb, Islamic intellectual history 173-174, 102. Other critical studies include Spannaus, Theology in Central Asia; Özervarlı, Theology in the Ottoman lands; essays in Demir et al. (eds.), Osmanlı'da ilm-i kelâm; Badeen, Sunnitische Theologie; Yazıcıoğlu, Le kalâm, etc. 2 El-Rouayheb, Islamic intellectual history 97-128. On commentaries and supercommentaries, see ibid. 33; Ahmed, Post-classical; Saleh, The gloss as intellectual history. 3 Melvin-Khoushki, Taḥqīq vs. taqlīd 214 and 216.
Historicizing Sunni Islam in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1450-c. 1750, edited by T. Krstic and D. Terzioglu, 2020
Recent studies in anthropology have increasingly come to understand Islam as a "set of interpreta... more Recent studies in anthropology have increasingly come to understand Islam as a "set of interpretative resources and practices" accumulated over centuries through engaging with the key sources of Islam-the Quran, hadith, and prophetic custom (sunna). In this view, being a Muslim is a result of individual and collective efforts "to grapple with those resources and shape those practices in meaningful ways," giving their practitioners a sense of being embedded in long chains of authenticated interpretation and transmission of a tradition.1 Tradition is here not understood as a simple replication of the past; it is not passively received but rather actively constructed in a particular social and historical setting, simultaneously affirming a "synchronic bond between actors" in a given community and extending it into the past, into a "diachronic community" of Muslims.2 The implication of this approach, which also informs the present volume, is that such efforts to engage with authenticating texts and acts as well as methods of interpretation of Islam transpired throughout history, resulting in numerous historically and contextually contingent understandings of what it means to be a Muslim. However, that is hardly reflected in mainstream historiography, which has long associated dynamism and evolution in Islamic traditions and their interpretation only with the so-called classical or formative period, from the first/seventh to the seventh/thirteenth century, while envisioning stagnation, decline, and derivativeness as the defining features of the centuries that followed. This has been particularly true for the geographies considered marginal to what is often viewed as the "core lands" of Islam (which for the late "formative" period typically means Syria, Egypt, and the Hijaz).3 1 Bowen, A new anthropology 3. 2 Grieve and Weiss, Illuminating the half-life of tradition 3. See also Anjum, Islam as a discursive tradition. 3 For a discussion of how this notion of "core lands" has been influencing writing about Islamic history, see Bashir, On Islamic time. Tijana Krstić -9789004440296 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2020 06:11:01PM via free access The millenial sovereign; Hagen, The order of knowledge; Burak, The second formation; El-Rouayheb, Islamic intellectual history; Binbaş, Intellectual networks; Atçıl, Scholars and sultans; Yılmaz, Caliphate redefined; Markiewicz, The crisis of kingship, to name just a few recent studies particularly relevant to the present collection. 5 Ahmed, What is Islam? 81. 6 Ahmed, What is Islam? 356-357. This body of meaning is not purely textual but includes a whole array of emotions, practices, actions, aesthetic choices, etc. that are meaningful to their actors in terms of Islam. Ahmed understands "Con-Text" as "the full encyclopaedia of epistemologies, interpretations, identities, persons and places, structures of authority, textualities and intertextualities, motifs, symbols, values, meaningful questions and meaningful answers, agreements and disagreements, emotions and affinities and affects, aesthetics, modes of saying, doing and being, and other truth-claims and components of existential exploration and meaning-making in terms of Islam that Muslims acting as Muslims have produced." 7 Juynboll, Sunna. Tijana Krstić -9789004440296 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2020 06:11:01PM via free access historicizing the study of sunni islam in the ottoman empire Tijana Krstić -9789004440296 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2020 06:11:01PM via free access
Pal Fodor, ed. The Battle for Central Europe: The Siege of Szigetvar and the Death of Suleyman the Magnificent and Miklos Zrinyi (1566) , 2019
In 1604, a charismatic Sufi sheikh from Tunis commissioned the translation into Ottoman Turkish o... more In 1604, a charismatic Sufi sheikh from Tunis commissioned the translation into Ottoman Turkish of Abdallāh b. Abdallāh al Tarjumān’s polemical text entitled Tuḥfat al-Adīb fī al-radd ʿalā ahl al-ṣalīb (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 Tuḥfa’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 Tuḥfa, is fea-
tured 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).
Key words : Polemics; conversion; narrative; intertextuality; Ottoman Empire; Tunis; Translation.
Introduction to special issue of the Journal of Early Modern History 19, 2-3 (2015), 93-105
Entangled Confessionalizations? Dialogic Perspectives on the Politics of Piety and Community-Building in the Ottoman Empire, 15th-18th Centuries, 2022
Historicizing Sunni Islam in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1450 c. 1750, edited by T. Krstic and D. Terzioglu (Brill), 2020
This book explores how Ottoman Muslims and Christians understood the phenomenon of conversion to ... more 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.
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 also introduces new sources, such as 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
“Buyurdum ki….” – The Whole World of Ottomanica and Beyond (Studies in Honour of Claudia Römer), edited by Hülya Çelik, Yavuz Köse, and Gisela Procházka-Eisl, 2023
This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
Entangled Confessionalizations? , 2022
Thus, Ismaʿil Sofi came to Persia, conquered it, so that the faith that first his father had taug... more Thus, Ismaʿil Sofi came to Persia, conquered it, so that the faith that first his father had taught, spread in all those lands. It had started in 1499. Short time later Luther emerged too and started sowing the seeds of his pernicious and infamous heresy in the German lands. And it is truly an astonishing thing, that at the time when among the Mohammedans the heresy of Haydar [Safavid shah Ismaʿil's father] arose, at the same time the heresy of Luther arose among the Christians. And not only in our own hemisphere, of both West and East, heresies emerged at the same time, but also in the southern hemisphere, in the New Indies, where many people abandoned their old religion and believed in Christ. Thus, at the same period everywhere occurred some kind of change in faith. Paolo Giovio, Historiarum sui temporis I (1550) This observation of the Catholic bishop and historian Paolo Giovio (d. 1552), made in the mid-sixteenth century, evidently rang true to the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, Nektarios (d. 1676), who repeated it verbatim in his own Compendium of Sacred World Histories (1677), written at St. Catherine's Monastery in Sinai more than a century later. 1 They both seem to have been of the opinion that the early sixteenth I would like to thank
Historicizing Sunni Islam in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1450-c. 1750, edited by T. Krstic and D. Terzioglu, 2020
Although still far from providing a comprehensive picture, recent research on Islamic theology in... more Although still far from providing a comprehensive picture, recent research on Islamic theology in post-fourteenth-century Central Asia as well as the Ottoman and Safavid realms has challenged the long-established view that in the "postclassical" era, and especially in these regions, the works on kalām became repetitive and derivative at best, or that the discipline experienced a complete demise, at worst.1 This view has long obfuscated new directions and tendencies in later kalām, often articulated in neglected glosses, commentaries, and supercommentaries on the works of older masters, which offer plentiful evidence of what Khaled El-Rouayheb has identified as new "textualphilological methodologies" through which scholars engaged with past works and arguments, not with the purpose of blindly imitating (taqlīd) but elaborating and/or independently verifying them (taḥqīq).2 Reflecting on recent efflorescence in research on early modern Islamic intellectual history, Matthew Melvin-Khoushki observed that unlike their European contemporaries who famously insisted on going back to and emulating the ancients, Ottoman scholars were perfectly content to textually inherit ancient learning through the "well-burnished prism" of their immediate Timurid, Turkmen, and Mamluk scholarly predecessors. Nevertheless, both Islamic and European scholars engaged in translating, commenting on, refining, critiquing, rejecting, subverting, and editing their intellectual patrimony-practices that Melvin-Khoushki groups under the broad rubric of taḥqīq, or verification through independent reasoning-which, he suggests, constituted "a new epistemic style that is distinctively early modern."3 1 For a critical overview of this stance as well as decline narratives that converged on the Ottoman period, see El-Rouayheb, Islamic intellectual history 173-174, 102. Other critical studies include Spannaus, Theology in Central Asia; Özervarlı, Theology in the Ottoman lands; essays in Demir et al. (eds.), Osmanlı'da ilm-i kelâm; Badeen, Sunnitische Theologie; Yazıcıoğlu, Le kalâm, etc. 2 El-Rouayheb, Islamic intellectual history 97-128. On commentaries and supercommentaries, see ibid. 33; Ahmed, Post-classical; Saleh, The gloss as intellectual history. 3 Melvin-Khoushki, Taḥqīq vs. taqlīd 214 and 216.
Historicizing Sunni Islam in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1450-c. 1750, edited by T. Krstic and D. Terzioglu, 2020
Recent studies in anthropology have increasingly come to understand Islam as a "set of interpreta... more Recent studies in anthropology have increasingly come to understand Islam as a "set of interpretative resources and practices" accumulated over centuries through engaging with the key sources of Islam-the Quran, hadith, and prophetic custom (sunna). In this view, being a Muslim is a result of individual and collective efforts "to grapple with those resources and shape those practices in meaningful ways," giving their practitioners a sense of being embedded in long chains of authenticated interpretation and transmission of a tradition.1 Tradition is here not understood as a simple replication of the past; it is not passively received but rather actively constructed in a particular social and historical setting, simultaneously affirming a "synchronic bond between actors" in a given community and extending it into the past, into a "diachronic community" of Muslims.2 The implication of this approach, which also informs the present volume, is that such efforts to engage with authenticating texts and acts as well as methods of interpretation of Islam transpired throughout history, resulting in numerous historically and contextually contingent understandings of what it means to be a Muslim. However, that is hardly reflected in mainstream historiography, which has long associated dynamism and evolution in Islamic traditions and their interpretation only with the so-called classical or formative period, from the first/seventh to the seventh/thirteenth century, while envisioning stagnation, decline, and derivativeness as the defining features of the centuries that followed. This has been particularly true for the geographies considered marginal to what is often viewed as the "core lands" of Islam (which for the late "formative" period typically means Syria, Egypt, and the Hijaz).3 1 Bowen, A new anthropology 3. 2 Grieve and Weiss, Illuminating the half-life of tradition 3. See also Anjum, Islam as a discursive tradition. 3 For a discussion of how this notion of "core lands" has been influencing writing about Islamic history, see Bashir, On Islamic time. Tijana Krstić -9789004440296 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2020 06:11:01PM via free access The millenial sovereign; Hagen, The order of knowledge; Burak, The second formation; El-Rouayheb, Islamic intellectual history; Binbaş, Intellectual networks; Atçıl, Scholars and sultans; Yılmaz, Caliphate redefined; Markiewicz, The crisis of kingship, to name just a few recent studies particularly relevant to the present collection. 5 Ahmed, What is Islam? 81. 6 Ahmed, What is Islam? 356-357. This body of meaning is not purely textual but includes a whole array of emotions, practices, actions, aesthetic choices, etc. that are meaningful to their actors in terms of Islam. Ahmed understands "Con-Text" as "the full encyclopaedia of epistemologies, interpretations, identities, persons and places, structures of authority, textualities and intertextualities, motifs, symbols, values, meaningful questions and meaningful answers, agreements and disagreements, emotions and affinities and affects, aesthetics, modes of saying, doing and being, and other truth-claims and components of existential exploration and meaning-making in terms of Islam that Muslims acting as Muslims have produced." 7 Juynboll, Sunna. Tijana Krstić -9789004440296 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2020 06:11:01PM via free access historicizing the study of sunni islam in the ottoman empire Tijana Krstić -9789004440296 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2020 06:11:01PM via free access
Pal Fodor, ed. The Battle for Central Europe: The Siege of Szigetvar and the Death of Suleyman the Magnificent and Miklos Zrinyi (1566) , 2019
In 1604, a charismatic Sufi sheikh from Tunis commissioned the translation into Ottoman Turkish o... more In 1604, a charismatic Sufi sheikh from Tunis commissioned the translation into Ottoman Turkish of Abdallāh b. Abdallāh al Tarjumān’s polemical text entitled Tuḥfat al-Adīb fī al-radd ʿalā ahl al-ṣalīb (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 Tuḥfa’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 Tuḥfa, is fea-
tured 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).
Key words : Polemics; conversion; narrative; intertextuality; Ottoman Empire; Tunis; Translation.
Introduction to special issue of the Journal of Early Modern History 19, 2-3 (2015), 93-105
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2009
... A. HUSAIN AND KE FLEMING, EDS., A Faithful Sea: The Religious Cultures of the Mediterranean, ... more ... A. HUSAIN AND KE FLEMING, EDS., A Faithful Sea: The Religious Cultures of the Mediterranean, 1200–1700 (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007). Pp. ... and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History, David Abulafia, ed., The Mediterranean in History, and WV ...
Journal of The Economic and Social History of The Orient, 2007
ANTON MINKOV CONVERSION TO ISLAM IN THE BALKANS Kisve BahasÌ Petitions and Ottoman Social Life, 1... more ANTON MINKOV CONVERSION TO ISLAM IN THE BALKANS Kisve BahasÌ Petitions and Ottoman Social Life, 1670-1730 ... The Ottoman Empire and Its Heritage XXX BRILL ... THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND ITS HERITAGE Politics, Society and Economy edited by Suraiya Faroqhi ...
Department of Historical Studies at CEU (brochure), 2024
Are you interested in pursuing MA or PhD in Historical Studies? Do you have talented students who... more Are you interested in pursuing MA or PhD in Historical Studies? Do you have talented students who might be interested in pursuing MA or PhD in Historical Studies? Don’t miss this opportunity!
Central European University (CEU) in Vienna is now accepting applications for scholarships in Historical Studies for the 2025–2026 academic year. Whether you're interested in Ottoman and Middle East Studies; Late Antique, Byzantine and Eastern Christian Studies; Russian Empire and Soviet history, Central European history, Museum Studies or other history-related fields, CEU offers generous funding opportunities to support your academic journey.
📝 For further information, visit the CEU Department of Historical Studies webpage (https://historicalstudies.ceu.edu/fields) or email historicalstudies@ceu.edu.
The deadline to apply is February 4, 2025 (23:59 CET).
Gorgias Press is delighted to announce the launch of its new inter-disciplinary book series: The ... more Gorgias Press is delighted to announce the launch of its new inter-disciplinary book series: The Modern Muslim World. The series will provide a platform for scholarly research on Islamic and Muslim thought, emerging from any geographic area and dated to any period from the 17th century until the present day. Academics dealing with any aspect of the Muslim world, irrespective of their specialisations (history, theology, philosophy, anthropology, science, art, economics, etc.), are invited to contribute to the series.
In Vienna, June 30–July 11, 2025, 2025
Apply by February 14 2025! Course details: https://summeruniversity.ceu.edu/2025-islam Financial... more Apply by February 14 2025!
Course details: https://summeruniversity.ceu.edu/2025-islam
Financial aid is available, in limited numbers.