The Road from Damascus: Circulation and the Redefinition of Islam in the Ottoman Empire, 1620-1720 (TOC + Introduction) (original) (raw)

Historicizing the Study of Sunni Islam in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1450-c. 1750

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 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

FOLLOWING THE STEPS OF THE IKHWAN AL-SAFA' IN THE OTTOMAN WORLD. I: INSIGHTS FROM THREE UNIVERSAL HISTORIES

Journal of Islamic Studies, 2023

This article is a first step in a project to study the influence of the Ras ajil Ikhw an al-S : af aj in the Ottoman world. We argue that, at least from the end of the fourteenth century until well into the second half of the sixteenth, the knowledge presented in the encyclopedic Ras ajil was a conspicuous scholarly source for the Ottoman cultural milieu, especially at the dynastic court, and played a significant role in forming their epistemological perspective. This argument is developed with reference to three universal histories: (1) in Turkish, the Iskendern ame (Book of Alexander) of Taceddin Ibrahim Ibn Hızır Ahmedi (d. 1413) written between the last quarter of the fourteenth century and the first quarter of the fifteenth; (2) in Arabic, the NaCm al-sul<k f; mus amarat al-mul<k *This study is the expanded version of a paper we presented together in Istanbul on the occasion of the 2nd International Professor Dr. Fuat Sezgin Symposium on the History of Science in Islam (7-9 October 2021). A first version was also presented by Fatma Sinem Eryılmaz at the MESA conference in 2017. Research for this paper benefited from the ERC project 'The origin and early development of philosophy in tenth-century al-Andalus: the impact of ill-defined materials and channels of transmission' (ERC-2016-ADG, 2017-2023, n. 740618) currently being conducted at UCLouvain. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and suggestions. All translations are ours unless indicated otherwise. (After the first citation, references to the Ras ajil are to the Arabic text in the series of critical editions with English translation published by Oxford University Press in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies. References are given in the form Ras ajil, Epistle N (editor), n-n, where N refers to the number of the Epistle and n-n to the page range.)

Islam and the Age of Ottoman Reform

Past & Present, 2010

The article highlights the importance of the idea of justice in motivating resistance to Sultan Mahmud II's 'reforms' in the 1830s, affecting first the Balkans and then Muhammad Ali Pasha in Egypt/Syria.

The Future of Islam, 1672-1924

Modern Intellectual History, 2018

Full article accessible without log-in via https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/future-of-islam-16721924/3790D12997E969770B3377018062981B/share/2f1f3fee5c30c49192779ff8efa29eb937669799 This article examines the ways in which defining the character of early Islam has been instrumental to contemporary political debates at distinct moments in time. It looks in particular at Restoration-era England and the last decades of the Ottoman Caliphate. In the latter period, European and Muslim scholars alike reappraised Islamic history in the context of the often polemical discourse surrounding pan-Islamism and the future of Islam. Indian Muslim writers especially moved into new and inventive historical territory. They took up the vocabulary of modern politics in their histories and in doing so pluralized the heritage of certain ideas and concepts, including democracy, constitutionalism, republicanism, and socialism. The result was the articulation of a usable, progressive Islamic past.

In an Ottoman Holy Land: The Hajj and the Road from Damascus, 1500-1800

History of Religions, 2020

In this article, I demonstrate how the hajj became a central devotional practice for all inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire —Muslim and non-Muslim, Arabs and Rumis—between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The motor of this transformation was the new infrastructure of the hajj that linked Istanbul to Damascus to Mecca and Medina. This infrastructure both changed the hajj into a journey into a larger holy land but also brought Christians to Jerusalem in emulation of the Muslim hajj. In particular, I emphasize in this article how to think of empire as a network or assemblage of human and non-human actors which results unintentionally in forms of shared culture, like the hajj.

The Muslim World: Recent Scholarship on the Ottoman MIddle East

Study of the Ottoman empire has flourished in the past two decades. Reaching beyond the imperial centre, new work probes the problem of living in far-flung peripheries and what it meant to negotiate religious and ethnic differences in times of upheaval and change. With a remarkable array of languages and grasp of the complexity of early modern societies, young scholars are exploring not just the representation and practice of Ottoman sovereignty and the response of elites but also the experience of the frontier, and survival strategies of slaves, prisoners of wars, converts and captives.