EDITORIAL FOREWORD
This issue opens with two articles that explore “Ottoman Belonging” during two significant moments bookending the Ottoman past. The first of these moments is the Ottoman Empire's incorporation of Arab lands after its defeat of the Mamluk Sultanate in 1515–17; the second is the emergence of Ottoman imperial citizenship in the period between the 1908 Constitutional Revolution and World War I, which precipitated the empire's collapse. Helen Pfeifer's article, “Encounter after the Conquest: Scholarly Gatherings in 16th-Century Ottoman Damascus,” traces the intellectual component of the Ottoman Empire's absorption of formerly Mamluk subjects after rapidly conquering an immense territory stretching from Damascus to Cairo to Mecca. As Western European states expanded to control new territories and peoples, the Turkish-speaking Ottomans from the central lands (Rumis) had new encounters of their own—with the Arabic-speaking inhabitants of Egypt, Greater Syria, and the Hijaz. The conquest transferred the seat of political power in the Islamicate world from Cairo to Istanbul. Yet, as Pfeifer discusses, the Ottomans understood that their newly acquired political power had no parallel in cultural and religious domains, where prestige belonged predominantly to Arab scholars. Focusing on majālis (sing. majlis), or scholarly gatherings, in Damascus, Pfeifer traces “one of the greatest instances of knowledge transmission and cultural encounter in the history of the Ottoman Empire,” through which this asymmetry was overcome. By facilitating the circulation of books and ideas, she argues, scholarly gatherings—two depictions of which are featured on the issue’s cover—gave rise to an “empire-wide learned culture as binding as any political or administrative ingredient of the Ottoman imperial glue.”