Caught Between Aspiration and Anxiety, Praise and Exhortation: An Arabic Literary Offering to the Ottoman Sultan Selīm I (original) (raw)
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In his 2005 study of homoerotic poetry in Arabic literature in the early Ottoman period, Khaled El-Rouayheb drew attention to "a remarkable dearth of secondary studies" in literary production of the period between 1500 and 1800 (Ottoman era), and argued that this is not because of a lack of "sourcematerial" but rather due to lack of "modern scholarly interest."1 Fortunately, since then, there has been a growing interest in Ottoman-era Arabic literature, and while negative value judgments of the period cease to play a serious role (at least explicitly) in modern scholarship, a major issue facing this overlooked subject remains the lack of focused studies of particular litterateurs and their works. Broad overviews of post-classical Arabic literature tend to provide useful guides to particular genres or modes of writing, serving as fruitful starting points for further research and reading. These resources, however, often conflate several political, geographical, and temporal signifiers, inadvertently producing research asymmetries in the field. Moreover, despite their privileging of breadth over concentration, these essential preliminary scholarly efforts generally taper off when their chronologies reach the Ottoman period. What we are left with is a confused pause, pregnant with an excitement for the unexplored.
"A Sufi Mirror: Shaykh Alwan al-Hamawi's (d. 1530) Advice for the Ottoman Ruler"
Crafting History: Essays on the Ottoman World and Beyond in Honor of Cemal Kafadar, edited by Rachel Goshgarian, Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, and Ali Yaycioglu, pp. 104-116. Brookline, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2023
Najm al-Din Muhammad al-Ghazzi (d. 1651), al-Kawakib al-sa'ira bi-aʿyan al-mi'a al-ʿashira, 3 vols., ed. Jibra'il Sulayman Jabbur (Beirut: Dar al-Afaq al-Jadida, [repr.] 1979), 2: 206-213; Ahmad b. Mustafa Tashkubrizada (d. 1561), al-Shaqa'iq al-nuʿmaniyya fi ʿulama' al-dawla al-ʿuthmaniyya (Beirut: Dar al-Kitab al-Arabi, 1975), 212; David Larsen, s.v. "al-Hamawi, ʿAlwan," EI 3 (2016), 5: 71-73; Nashwa al-Alwani, "al-Shaykh ʿAli b. ʿAtiyya al-Hiti al-Hamawi al-Shafiʿi al-Husayni, 873-936 H., al-mulaqqab bi-ʿAlwan: fikruhu al-islahi wa-al-ijtimaʿi," al-Basa'ir 26 (1994): 7-73; Ali b. Atiyya al-Hiti al-Hamawi [Shaykh Alwan], al-Nasa'ih al-muhimma li-al-muluk wa al-a'imma, ed. Nashwa al-Alwani (Damascus: Dar al-Maktabi, 2000), 13-18; Matthew Wiley Simonds, "ʿAli b. Maymun: An Early 16th Century Sufi Saint and Critic of the ʿUlama' with an edition of ʿAlwan al-Hamawi's Mujli al-huzn ʿan al-mahzun fi manaqib al-shaykh al-sayyid al-sharif Abi al-Hasan ʿAli b. Maymun"
Philological Encounters, 2019
The article examines the efforts of Muḥammad al-Mahdī al-Fāsī (d. 1605) and his readers in the Ottoman domains to reconstruct an authoritative version of Muḥammad b. Sulaymān b. Abī Bakr al-Jazūlī's (d. 1465) Dalā'il al-khayrāt. In his commentary on the Dalā'il, al-Fāsī recorded his collation of multiple versions of al-Jazūlī's work. The commentary and its contribution to a notion of an authoritative and authorial version of Dalā'il al-khayrāt accompanied al-Jazūlī's text in its journey to the eastern parts of the Islamic world and helped readers there bridge a two-century gap in the transmission of the work. The article studies the manners in which Ottoman readers/reciters of Dalā'il used al-Fāsī's commentary to create a channel to al-Jazūlī and the divine. In so doing, the article seeks to draw attention to additional functions of the genre of the commentary in the Islamic tradition. Moreover, by focusing on the textual practices of al-Fāsī and his Ottoman readers, the essay argues that the act of collation of the multiple versions of Dalā'il al-khayrāt was in and of itself an ethical act of devotion that manifested the readers'/reciters' quest for proximity to al-Jazūlī.
Der Islam, 96/1 (2019), 42-86
This study presents and intellectual- and literary-historically contextualizes a remarkable but as yet unpublished treatise by Ibn Turka (d. 1432), foremost occult philosopher of Timurid Iran: the Munāẓara-yi Bazm u Razm. As its title indicates, this ornate Persian work, written in 1426 in Herat for the Timurid prince-calligrapher Bāysunghur (d. 1433), takes the form of a literary debate, a venerable Arabo-Persian genre that exploded in popularity in the post-Mongol period. Yet it triply transgresses the bounds of its genre, and doubly marries Arabic-Mamluk literary and imperial culture to Persian-Timurid. For here Ibn Turka recasts the munāẓara as philosophical romance and the philosophical romance as mirror for princes, imperializing the razm u bazm and sword vs. pen tropes within an expressly lettrist framework, making explicit the logic of the coincidentia oppositorum (majmaʿ al-aḍdād) long implicit in the genre in order to ideologically weaponize it. For the first time in the centuries-old Arabo-Persian munāẓara tradition, that is, wherein such debates were often rhetorically but never theoretically resolved, Ibn Turka marries multiple opposites in a manner clearly meant to be instructive to his Timurid royal patron: he is to perform the role of Emperor Love (sulṭān ʿishq), transcendent of all political-legal dualities, avatar of the divine names the Manifest (al-ẓāhir) and the Occult (al-bāṭin). This lettrist mirror for Timurid princes is thus not simply unprecedented in Persian or indeed Arabic literature, a typical expression of the ornate literary panache and genre-hybridizing proclivities of Mamluk-Timurid-Ottoman scientists of letters, and index of the burgeoning of Ibn ʿArabian-Būnian lettrism in late Mamluk Cairo; it also serves as key to Timurid universalist imperial ideology itself in its formative phase—and consciously epitomizes the principle of contradiction driving Islamicate civilization as a whole. To show the striking extent to which this munāẓara departs from precedent, I provide a brief overview of the sword vs. pen subset of that genre; I then examine our text’s specific political-philosophical and sociocultural contexts, with attention to Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī’s (d. 1274) Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī and Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī’s (d. 1502) Akhlāq-i Jalālī on the one hand—which seminal Persian mirrors for princes assert, crucially, the ontological-political primacy of love over justice—and the Ẓafarnāma of Sharaf al-Dīn Yazdī (d. 1454), Ibn Turka’s student and friend, on the other. In the latter, much-imitated history Amir Temür (r. 1370-1405) was definitively transformed, on the basis of astrological and lettrist proofs, into the supreme Lord of Conjunction (ṣāḥib-qirān); most notably, there Yazdī theorizes the Muslim world conqueror as historical manifestation of the coincidentia oppositorum—precisely the project of Ibn Turka in his Debate of Feast and Fight. But these two ideologues of Timurid universal imperialism and leading members of the New Brethren of Purity network only became such in Mamluk Cairo, where lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf) was first sanctified, de-esotericized and adabized; I accordingly invoke the overtly occultist-neopythagoreanizing ethos specific to the Mamluk capital by the late 14th century, especially that propagated at the court of Barqūq (r. 1382-99). For it is this Cairene ethos, I argue, that is epitomized by our persophone lettrist’s munāẓara, which it effectively timuridizes. To demonstrate the robustness of this Mamluk-Timurid ideological-literary continuity, I situate the Munāẓara-yi Bazm u Razm within Ibn Turka’s own oeuvre and imperial ideological program, successively developed for the Timurid rulers Iskandar Sulṭān (r. 1409-14), Shāhrukh (r. 1409-47) and Ulugh Beg (r. 1409-49); marshal three contemporary instances of the sword vs. pen munāẓara, one Timurid and two Mamluk, by the theologian Sayyid Sharīf Jurjānī (d. 1413), the secretary-encyclopedist Aḥmad al-Qalqashandī (d. 1418) and the historian Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1408) respectively; and provide an abridged translation of Ibn Turka’s offering as basis for comparative analysis.
Licit Magic -GlobalLit Working Papers No. 11 - Kristof D'hulster - Sitting in on an Ottoman Madrasa Course in Rhetoric. Gürānī's Interlinear Translation-cum-Commentary of the Preface of al-Qazwīnī's Talkhīṣ al-Miftāḥ, 2022
This working paper presents a 16th- or 17th-century Ottoman translation-cum-commentary of the preface and introduction of one of the classics of Islamicate rhetoric, al-Qazwīnī’s Talkhīṣ al-Miftāḥ (The Key’s Digest), a 14th-century work on rhetoric based on al-Sakkākī’s 13th-century seminal Miftāḥ al-ʿUlūm (The Key of Sciences). This particular work is translated not because of its exceptional quality, but—quite on the contrary—because of its emblematic nature, as it provides us with a glimpse of the kind of texts on rhetoric that madrasa students throughout the Ummah engaged with, and—perhaps even more importantly—with a glimpse of the way in which they did so: through interlinear translations and/or commentaries. Al-Qazwīnī as the author and Gürānī as the translator-cum-commentator walk the student through some highly condensed definitions of “eloquence” and “rhetoric”, each of which is defined first and foremost negatively and hardly ever positively (negatively as the absence of tanāfur al-ḥurūf, gharāba, mukhālafat al-qiyās al-lughawī, al-karāha fī l-samʿ, ḍaʿf al-taʾlīf, tanāfur al-kalimāt, taʿqīd, kathrat al-takrār, and tatābuʿ al-iḍāfāt; positively as muṭābaqa li muqtaḍā l-ḥāl). The text concludes with a rather confusing discussion of the branches of rhetoric and their nomenclature.