Ahmet Tunç Şen
I am a historian of the Ottoman Empire currently teaching in the Department of History at Columbia University. My research revolves around the questions about the history of science and divination, history of mentalities and perceptions of time, history of books/manuscripts and their readers, and social history of scholarship and education in the early modern era. I have a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago (2016) with a dissertation on astrology and astrologers at the early modern Ottoman court that received the inaugural MEM (Middle East Medievalists) dissertation prize in 2018. I am working on my first book based on the dissertation and tentatively titled "The Masters of Time: Astrologers and Scientific Expertise at the Early Modern Ottoman Court" that examines the role of stargazers at the early modern Ottoman court in measuring, displaying, and interpreting time, ranging from chronological datings to designation of precise auspicious moments.
I am one of the collaborators of the international research project, Geographies and Histories of the Ottoman Supernatural Tradition: Exploring Magic, the Marvelous, and the Strange in Ottoman Mentalities led by Dr. Marinos Sariyannis and funded by the European Research Council. I am also co-chairing the Columbia University Ottoman and Turkish Studies Seminars and sitting on the advisory board for the Manuscripts of the Muslim World project at Columbia University. Prior to joining Columbia University, I taught courses on Ottoman history/paleography and Modern Middle East history at Leiden University during the academic year 2016-2017.
Supervisors: Cornell H. Fleischer, John E. Woods, and Hakan Karateke
Address: 610 Fayerweather Hall
1180 Amsterdam Avenue, MC 2527
New York, NY 10027
I am one of the collaborators of the international research project, Geographies and Histories of the Ottoman Supernatural Tradition: Exploring Magic, the Marvelous, and the Strange in Ottoman Mentalities led by Dr. Marinos Sariyannis and funded by the European Research Council. I am also co-chairing the Columbia University Ottoman and Turkish Studies Seminars and sitting on the advisory board for the Manuscripts of the Muslim World project at Columbia University. Prior to joining Columbia University, I taught courses on Ottoman history/paleography and Modern Middle East history at Leiden University during the academic year 2016-2017.
Supervisors: Cornell H. Fleischer, John E. Woods, and Hakan Karateke
Address: 610 Fayerweather Hall
1180 Amsterdam Avenue, MC 2527
New York, NY 10027
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This study consists of three major parts, each undertaken with a combination of different historiographical approaches. The first part (Chapter 1) examines the intellectual and cultural history of astrological practice in the late-medieval and early modern Islamicate culture. I argue that contrary to the scholarly convictions in the historiography of Arabic science, astrology retained its prestigious status as a learned discipline with complex astronomical and mathematical underpinnings. The heightened interest during this period in the eastern Islamic lands in conducting observational enterprises and updating the available celestial data in the astronomical tables was inextricably related to the need for undertaking more accurate practice of astrology.
The second part (Chapter 2 and Chapter 3) of the dissertation focuses on the social history of munajjims in the Ottoman realm and tries to understand the complex social and patronage dynamics within which they functioned. By tracking their career trajectories from their vocational training to professional service, this part addresses several questions about the contents, mechanisms, and institutional structures of learning and practicing astrologically valid knowledge.
The third, and the last, part (Chapter 4 and Chapter 5) examines in a detailed fashion the personal and political implications of the ever-changing textual contents and constituents of almanac-prognostications (taqwīm) and other occasional horoscopes. By documenting the political significance and public recognition of astrological prognostications, this part demonstrates the ability of often-marginalized astrological texts to provide surprising complementary details about the early modern Ottoman political culture.
This article sets out to address these questions by spotlighting the contents of a curious manuscript of clear Ottoman provenance currently housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) in Paris. The book includes several separate short tracts and textual fragments, mostly dealing with calendric computation and different divination techniques, penned down by manifestly different hands, some not fully literate in Arabic script. The nature of texts found in the manuscript and some of the curious notes on certain folios of the book (left by an Ottoman sailor taking part in military ventures and directly addressing his fellow seafarers on board) offer a unique window into capturing, with striking immediacy, the sentiments of a particular Ottoman individual and his respective community in motion that had resort to supernatural forces and other tools of divination in their fight for survival under dire circumstances.
This study seeks to determine the extent of the patronage of the science of the stars (ʿilm al-nuǧūm) at the court of the eighth Ottoman sultan Bāyezīd II (r. 886/1481-918/1512). Throughout the medieval and early modern Islamicate world munaǧǧims (astronomer-astrologers) offered rulers their expertise in calculating heavenly configurations and interpreting them with a view to predicting future events; here the Ottoman polity is no exception. In the case of Bāyezīd II, however, the sheer number of munaǧǧims employed and texts and instruments commissioned by or dedicated to the sultan unequivocally singles him out and makes it possible to further argue that his deliberate attempt to personally study and cultivate the science of the stars was inextricably related to the broader political, ideological, and cultural agendas at the time.
This study consists of three major parts, each undertaken with a combination of different historiographical approaches. The first part (Chapter 1) examines the intellectual and cultural history of astrological practice in the late-medieval and early modern Islamicate culture. I argue that contrary to the scholarly convictions in the historiography of Arabic science, astrology retained its prestigious status as a learned discipline with complex astronomical and mathematical underpinnings. The heightened interest during this period in the eastern Islamic lands in conducting observational enterprises and updating the available celestial data in the astronomical tables was inextricably related to the need for undertaking more accurate practice of astrology.
The second part (Chapter 2 and Chapter 3) of the dissertation focuses on the social history of munajjims in the Ottoman realm and tries to understand the complex social and patronage dynamics within which they functioned. By tracking their career trajectories from their vocational training to professional service, this part addresses several questions about the contents, mechanisms, and institutional structures of learning and practicing astrologically valid knowledge.
The third, and the last, part (Chapter 4 and Chapter 5) examines in a detailed fashion the personal and political implications of the ever-changing textual contents and constituents of almanac-prognostications (taqwīm) and other occasional horoscopes. By documenting the political significance and public recognition of astrological prognostications, this part demonstrates the ability of often-marginalized astrological texts to provide surprising complementary details about the early modern Ottoman political culture.
This article sets out to address these questions by spotlighting the contents of a curious manuscript of clear Ottoman provenance currently housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) in Paris. The book includes several separate short tracts and textual fragments, mostly dealing with calendric computation and different divination techniques, penned down by manifestly different hands, some not fully literate in Arabic script. The nature of texts found in the manuscript and some of the curious notes on certain folios of the book (left by an Ottoman sailor taking part in military ventures and directly addressing his fellow seafarers on board) offer a unique window into capturing, with striking immediacy, the sentiments of a particular Ottoman individual and his respective community in motion that had resort to supernatural forces and other tools of divination in their fight for survival under dire circumstances.
This study seeks to determine the extent of the patronage of the science of the stars (ʿilm al-nuǧūm) at the court of the eighth Ottoman sultan Bāyezīd II (r. 886/1481-918/1512). Throughout the medieval and early modern Islamicate world munaǧǧims (astronomer-astrologers) offered rulers their expertise in calculating heavenly configurations and interpreting them with a view to predicting future events; here the Ottoman polity is no exception. In the case of Bāyezīd II, however, the sheer number of munaǧǧims employed and texts and instruments commissioned by or dedicated to the sultan unequivocally singles him out and makes it possible to further argue that his deliberate attempt to personally study and cultivate the science of the stars was inextricably related to the broader political, ideological, and cultural agendas at the time.
This podcast is based on a recording of a free public event entitled "Imagining & Narrating Plague in the Ottoman World: A Conversation with Orhan Pamuk & Nükhet Varlık" held on November 12, 2018 at Columbia University organized by A. Tunç Şen and The Sakıp Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies. The event was sponsored by The Sakıp Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies, The Columbia University School of the Arts, The Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, and The Department of History at Columbia University.
The sessions will take place online. Register in advance:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMrcO6uqzIpHdcJJOA1FsDBx6VhXbgQjXqd