Nir Shafir

Although it is generally thought that Muslims paid little attention to pre-Islamic antiquity, the Damascene scholar ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī visited and described the Roman ruins of Baalbek twice, in 1689 and 1700. He interpreted the site, however, not as a temple but as a palace built by jinns for Solomon. Nābulusī was very likely aware of the site's Roman past but purposefully played with its historicity to highlight Syria's innate sanctity. His interpretation of Baalbek reveals an antiquarian project in the Ottoman Empire that was constructed along variant but parallel lines to the better known one in Renaissance Europe.

The Phanariots-Grecophone Christian elites who ruled the Danubian principalities in the eighteenth century-were the only non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire who claimed power by virtue of their command of the Turkish language. Why were they the rare exception and what does their story reveal about the ways in which power and language were intertwined in the early modern Ottoman Empire? The implicit power relations embedded in the Turkish language are rendered visible in a unique text written in 1731 in which Constantine Mavrocordatos, a Phanariot prince, attempted to school his younger brother in Turkish through a series of twelve, play-like dialogues. The dialogues did not aim to teach the formal grammar of Turkish but to demonstrate the power of speech by familiarizing the reader with the eloquent and witty repartee of Ottoman bureaucrats. Through an analysis of the text-which includes reestablishing its authorship and date of composition-the article examines the Phanariots' liminal position in Ottoman governance, especially in the newly ascendant imperial bureaucracy, through the prism of language. In doing so, it also rewrites the place of the Mavrocordatos family in the story of the Enlightenment in the Ottoman Empire.

In the seventeenth century, Ottoman jurists repeatedly tried to stop Muslims from stating that they "belonged to the religion of Abraham." A century earlier, however, the expression had been a core part of the new confessional identity of the empire's Muslims. This article explores how the phrase changed from an attestation of faith to a sign of heresy through a study of a short pamphlet by Minḳārīzāde Yaḥyā Efendi. Minḳārīzāde argued that the use of the phrase is not permissible and addressed his arguments not to learned scholars, but to the semi-educated. I argue that Minḳārīzāde's pamphlet provides a glimpse into "vernacular legalism" in action in the Ottoman Empire, that is, how semi-educated audiences received and understood legal debates and subsequently turned law into a space of popular politics.

In this article, I examine the revival of the medieval genre of heresiographies (milal wa niḥal) in the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I demonstrate how Ottoman authors revived the heresiography in response to the new threat of the Safavids in the sixteenth century. I then trace the reception of manuscripts in the seventeenth century to show how Ottoman readers then applied the heresiographies not against the empire’s enemies but its own population. In particular, I demonstrate a new methodology for understanding the reception of ideas and texts in the Ottoman Empire based on a mass analysis of codicological data.

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.

This article is part of a roundtable titled “Chasing the Ottoman Early Modern,” (guest eds. Virginia Aksan, Boğac Ergene, and Antonis Hadjikyriacou), which brings together leading Ottomanists to comment on the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and global early modernity. Drawing on my research on the history of the book, I argue against the usage of early modernity in Ottoman history, not because early modernity cannot be global, but because it leads us down the path of narrativizing a largely arbitrary temporal rupture.

Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an immense body of morality literature emerged in the Ottoman Empire as part of a widespread turn to piety. This article draws upon the anthropology of Islamic revival and secularism to reassess this literature’s importance and propose a new view of the history of political thought in the empire. It does so through a close analysis of a fundamental concept of Ottoman political life: “naṣīḥat, ” or “advice.” Historians have used “advice books” to counter the presumption that the Ottoman Empire declined after the sixteenth century, but in doing so they have overlooked the concept’s broader meaning as “morally corrective criticism.” I analyze two competing visions of naṣīḥat at the turn of the eighteenth century to reveal how the concept was deployed to politically transform the empire by reforming its subjects’ morality. One was a campaign by the chief jurist Feyżullah Efendi to educate every Muslim in the basic tenets of Islam. The other was a wildly popular “advice book” written by the poet Nābī to his son that both explicates a new moral code and declares the empire’s government and institutions illegitimate. Both transformed politics by requiring that all subjects be responsible moral, and therefore political, actors. The pietistic turn, I argue, turned domestic spaces into political battlegrounds and ultimately created new, individualistic political subjectivities. This, though, requires challenging functionalist conceptions of the relationship between religion and politics and the secularist inclination among historians to relegate morality to the private sphere.

Fake miniatures depicting Islamic science have found their way into the most august of libraries and history books. How? | This is an excerpt of a larger (yet unpublished) article. This piece was online at Aeon on 11 Sep 2018, https://aeon.co/essays/why-fake-miniatures-depicting-islamic-science-are-everywhere

A chapter from an edited volume devoted to the late seventeenth-century Damascene thinker, Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi. This essay tackles his treatise on memory and forgetfulness and how to treat the latter. Full volume is _Early Modern Trends in Islamic Theology: ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī and his Network of Scholarship_, Lejla Demiri and Samuela Pagani (eds.), Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck (2018)

This is a collective experiment to create and update an ongoing bibliography on the history of science and medicine in the modern and colonial Middle East. Please follow the link to the Google Doc below and feel free to add anything relevant that you wish.

Fall 2020 Online Seminar Series
All talks will occur at 12:00 PM PST.
Please be sure to register in order to attend via Zoom.

October 29: Jonathan Parkes Allen (Maryland): “The Many Makings of Martyrs in the Early Modern Ottoman World”
Registration Link: https://ucsd.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIqdOiurjkiH92Z2kAdxVXdCPzK-9b3qLHU

Nov. 6 (Friday): Sam Dolbee (Harvard): The Desert at the End of Empire: An Environmental History of the Armenian Genocide
Registration Link: https://ucsd.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0ocu6qqzgvGNFmGBpu6hXk72VaHlOW51kI

Nov. 12: Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano (Penn): Spaces of Poetry: Inhabiting Istanbul through Poetry after the Ottoman Conquest
Registration Link: https://ucsd.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIrcu2grz0uE9em-YehsCyaVzocrkCZM0_9

Nov. 19: Aslıhan Gürbüzel (McGill): Anti-Puritan Alliances in the Ottoman Empire and the Limits of State Religion
Registration Link: https://ucsd.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYqc--qpjotG9wMXszVbYHZmXxznUnXHM11

Dec. 3: Mary Elston (Harvard Law School): “Heritage (Turāth) in Modern Egypt: From Muḥammad ‘Abduh to Ali Gomaa”
Registration Link: https://ucsd.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUocOyvrzwvH9GfEy6Q9IwYuOvt-zz1HMWl

Dec 10: Ana Sekulic (European University Institute): Bosnia between Wilderness and Heavenly Gardens: The Making of Religious Belonging and Landscape in the Ottoman Empire
Registration Link: https://ucsd.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJItf-yhrTMjH931uVygEQ8vpkEKkxpxdq0R

The mass digitization of manuscripts is blurring the long held boundaries between manuscript libraries and archives and altering the act of research in the process. Scholars often view the changes that digitization entails in a negative light as the physical document is increasingly removed from the hands of the researcher. Here, though, I would like to take a different approach and explore the true possibilities provided by digitization as scholars are able to ask new questions, discover unknown texts, and gain a different understanding of intellectual life in the early modern Islamic world in particular. My belief is that a fundamental shift has occurred now that researchers can view twenty, fifty, or even one hundred manuscripts a day rather than two to three. In what follows, I examine some of the techniques we can use and the insights we can gain when given the opportunity to look at thousands of manuscripts during a research period.