Bilingual Heaven: Was There a Distinct Persianate Islam in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire?

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 214-241
Author(s):  
Aslıhan Gürbüzel
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
The Other ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Sacred Text ◽  
Native Languages ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
Legal Discourses ◽  
Other World

Abstract What is the language of heaven? Is Arabic the only language allowed in the eternal world of the virtuous, or will Muslims continue to speak their native languages in the other world? While learned scholars debated the language of heaven since the early days of Islam, the question gained renewed vigor in seventeenth century Istanbul against the background of a puritan reform movement which criticized the usage of Persian and the Persianate canon as sacred text. In response, Mevlevī authors argued for the discursive authority of the Persianate mystical canon in Islamic tradition (sunna). Focusing on this debate, this article argues that early modern Ottoman authors recognized non-legal discourses as integral and constitutive parts of the Islamic tradition. By adopting the imagery of bilingual heaven, they conceptualized Islamic tradition as a diverse discursive tradition. Alongside diversity, another important feature of Persianate Islam was a positive propensity towards innovations.

ON OTTOMAN JUSTICE: INTERPRETATIONS IN CONFLICT (1600 - 1800)

2001 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bogaç Ergene
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Central Government ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
Court Records ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
The Military

AbstractThis essay investigates the ways in which the notion of "justice" was utilized as a mechanism of political legitimization in the early-modern Ottoman Empire. I claim that there existed alternative definitions of justice and that these were instrumental in the struggle between the central government and those official and unofficial power-holders in the administrative and geographical peripheries of the empire. According to the specialized terminology of the Ottoman administrative system, "justice" was the protection of the rural and urban producers against abuses of the military elite. This definition highlighted the personal benevolence of the ruler who claimed to be the sole protector of the weak against oppression. On the other hand, at least some segments of the ruling elite insisted on representing justice as the recognition of the mutual rights and obligations of the sultan and his "servants." Justice, in this context, referred to the protection of privileges and entitlements of those who were thought to deserve them. While using a variety of sources - including treatises on government and ethics composed by the Ottoman literati, documents from regional court records and correspondence between the imperial center and the officials in the provinces - my primary focus is on Evliya Çelebi's seventeenth-century travel-book, Seyahatname, and a well-known seventeenth century chronicle, Tarih-i Naima.

scholarly journals “Turkish” Textiles in South-Eastern and East-Central Europe in the Early Modern Period: The Evidence of Transylvanian Customs Accounts

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 363-382
Author(s):  
Mária Pakucs-Willcocks
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Serial Data

Abstract This paper analyzes data from customs accounts in Transylvania from the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth on traffic in textiles and textile products from the Ottoman Empire. Cotton was known and commercialized in Transylvania from the fifteenth century; serial data will show that traffic in Ottoman cotton and silk textiles as well as in textile objects such as carpets grew considerably during the second half of the seventeenth century. Customs registers from that period also indicate that Poland and Hungary were destinations for Ottoman imports, but Transylvania was a consumer’s market for cotton textiles.

scholarly journals The Bishop’s Role in Two Non-Catholic States

2015 ◽  
Vol 95 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 245-255
Author(s):  
Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Crucial Aspect ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
Confessional Identity ◽  
The One ◽  
Catholic Reform

This paper contrasts the very different roles played by the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland, on the one hand, and Turkish-occupied Hungary, on the other, in the movement of early modern religious reform. It suggests that the decision of Propaganda Fide to adopt an episcopal model of organisation in Ireland after 1618, despite the obvious difficulties posed by the Protestant nature of the state, was a crucial aspect of the consolidation of a Catholic confessional identity within the island. The importance of the hierarchy in leadership terms was subsequently demonstrated in the short-lived period of de facto independence during the 1640s and after the repression of the Cromwellian period the episcopal model was successfully revived in the later seventeenth century. The paper also offers a parallel examination of the case of Turkish Hungary, where an effective episcopal model of reform could not be adopted, principally because of the jurisdictional jealousy of the Habsburg Kings of Hungary, who continued to claim rights of nomination to Turkish controlled dioceses but whose nominees were unable to reside in their sees. Consequently, the hierarchy of Turkish-occupied Hungary played little or no role in the movement of Catholic reform, prior to the Habsburg reconquest.

Strategy and imagination in a Mughal Sufi story of creation

2012 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muzaffar Alam
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Sanskrit Text ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
Different Order ◽  
The Prestige

This article examines a seventeenth-century text that attempts to reconcile Hindu and Muslim accounts of human genesis and cosmogony. The text, Mir’āt al-Makhlūqāt (‘Mirror of Creation’), written by a noted Mughal Sufi author Shaikh ‘Abd al-Rahman Chishti, purportedly a translation of a Sanskrit text, adopts rhetorical strategies and mythological elements of the Purāna tradition in order to argue that evidence of the Muslim prophets was available in ancient Hindu scriptures. Chishti thus accepts the reality of ancient Hindu gods and sages and notes the truth in their message. In doing so Chishti adopts elements of an older argument within the Islamic tradition that posits thousands of cycles of creation and multiple instances of Adam, the father of humans. He argues however that the Hindu gods and sages belonged to a different order of creation and time, and were not in fact human. The text bears some generic resemblance to Bhavishyottarapurāna materials. Chishti combines aspects of polemics with a deft use of politics. He addresses, on the one hand, Hindu intellectuals who claimed the prestige of an older religion, while he also engages, on the other hand, with Muslim theologians and Sufis like the Naqshbandi Mujaddidis who for their part refrained from engaging with Hindu traditions at all.

Episcopal Tombs in Early Modern England

2004 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 654-680 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER SHERLOCK
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Status ◽  
The One ◽  
The Church

The Reformation simultaneously transformed the identity and role of bishops in the Church of England, and the function of monuments to the dead. This article considers the extent to which tombs of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bishops represented a set of episcopal ideals distinct from those conveyed by the monuments of earlier bishops on the one hand and contemporary laity and clergy on the other. It argues that in death bishops were increasingly undifferentiated from other groups such as the gentry in the dress, posture, location and inscriptions of their monuments. As a result of the inherent tension between tradition and reform which surrounded both bishops and tombs, episcopal monuments were unsuccessful as a means of enhancing the status or preserving the memory and teachings of their subjects in the wake of the Reformation.

Havoc

2021 ◽  
pp. 111-126
Author(s):  
Faisal H. Husain
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
The Other ◽  
Drought Event ◽  
Effective Response ◽  
Abrupt Shift ◽  
Prolonged Drought ◽  
Channel Shift ◽  
To Come

This chapter recounts a dramatic turning point in the Ottoman Empire’s relationship to the Tigris and Euphrates. In the late seventeenth century, a prolonged drought event and a botched canal project triggered an abrupt shift in the Euphrates’ channel southwest of Baghdad. Beset by plague outbreaks and rural uprisings, the Ottoman provincial administration could not mount an effective response to deal with the chaos unleashed by the channel shift. The Ottoman imperial center, on the other hand, was preoccupied with a prolonged war on its western front. An engineering expedition dispatched from Istanbul in late 1701 came too late to restore the Euphrates to its original bed. The Ottoman Empire had to come to terms with the new fluvial landscape.

Theatrical torture versus dramatic cruelty: subjection through representation or praxis1

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frans-Willem Korsten
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Other ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Political Event ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Peculiar Case

The distinction between the theatrical and the dramatic is pivotal for different modes of subjection in the early modern era. Institutionally speaking, society was organized ideologically, theatrically by the introjection of what was shown publicly to private, but equally collective, theatres of the mind. This could be described as a logic of torture. In contrast, and on the other hand, the dramatic application of punishment on ships, and the pain it involved, served what Robert Cover called a ‘balance of terror’, based on a logic of what Deleuze defined as ‘cruelty’. In order to clarify this distinction, and the implication it has for our ideas on gouvernmentalité, this chapter will propose a close reading of a painting by Lieve Verschuier that either depicts a peculiar case of keelhauling or, allegorically, the lynching of the brothers De Witt in 1672. Although the painting is clearly theatrical, formally speaking, it superimposes a dramatic logic on the traumatic political event of the lynching of the brothers De Witt. This will be considered in the chapter as one instance of a more general shift in the seventeenth century: a shift away from the theatrical logic of torture to the dramatic logic of cruelty.

Grain Prices and Subsistence Crises in England and France, 1590–1740

1979 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 865-887 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew B. Appleby
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Other ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Grain Prices

In early modern Europe the major concern of many people was getting enough food to stay alive. The “problem of subsistence” varied considerably, however, between one country—or one region—and another. England, for instance, was free of major subsistence crises during the later seventeenth century, when France was hard hit by repeated and deadly famines. In this essay I shall point out some of the differences between these two countries that might explain the success of one and the failure of the other to feed its people.

Hybridizing Scholastic Psychology with Chinese Medicine: A Seventeenth-Century Chinese Catholic's Conceptions of Xin (Mind and Heart)

2008 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 313-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qiong Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Chinese Medicine ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Contact Zone ◽  
Medical Doctor ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Theoretical Position ◽  
East West

AbstractThis paper explores the dynamics of cultural interactions between early modern China and Europe initiated by the Jesuits and other Catholic missionaries through a case study of Wang Honghan, a seventeenth-century Chinese Catholic who systematically sought to integrate European learning introduced by the missionaries with pre-modern Chinese medicine. Focusing on the ways in which Wang combined his Western and Chinese sources to develop and articulate his views on xin (mind and heart), this paper argues that Wang arrived at a peculiar hybrid between scholastic psychology and Chinese medicine, not so much through a course of haphazard misunderstanding as through his conscious and patterned use and abuse of his Western sources, which was motivated most possibly by a wish to define a theoretical position that most suited his social roles as a Catholic convert and a Chinese medical doctor. Thus, rather than seeing Wang as an epitome of "transmission failure," this paper offers it as a showcase for the tremendous dynamism and creativity occurring at this East-West "contact zone" as representatives of both cultures sought to appropriate and transform the symbolic and textual resources of the other side.

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