Many of the core jurists of Fez under the Marinid Dynasty (1244-1465) never traveled to the Islamic East and never performed the hajj pilgrimage. In this age of the great Maghribi traveler Ibn Battuta (d. 1377), travel may have been difficult, but it was not impossible. Some Marinid scholars did make the pilgrimage, while other scholars from further east cycled through the Marinid court, the most notable of these being Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406). This paper explores two sets of related questions: what were the reasons that so many Marinid jurists did not travel to the Islamic East, and how did this lack of travel shape the intellectual and jurisprudential environment of Marinid Fez? The paper considers how people, knowledge, and ideas circulated between the Islamic East and West, and why in only a few cases Marinid scholars were included in biographical dictionaries from the Islamic East. Using sources such as biographical dictionaries, city histories, political chronicles, and fatwas, it also traces intellectual and legal debates among North African scholars, and the engagement of these debates with scholarly trends of the Islamic East.

There has been an increased and lively interest recently in the broad problem of the transmission of knowledge in Islam. Considerable scholarship deals with the modes, venues and practices involved in this process.The present paper aims to contribute to this growing body of scholarship, by examining a group of Sufis in the fifteenth century and the prominence of the locale and the practice in the dissemination of their doctrines. The issue of the transmission of knowledge in Islam has always been a trans-regional one. The present study is of a similar nature: Zayn al-Din Khwafi (d. 1435), a prominent Sufi of the Timurid Herat, undertook a pilgrimage (Hajj) that covered the years 1419-1421. In the course of this, traveling through Iran, he visited Iraq, Syria and Egypt, in addition to the Hijaz region. Sufis in Anatolia and Egypt at the time, upon learning of the coming of this great shaykh from the East, set out to meet him in Jerusalem and Cairo. Some of them undertook the return trip to Herat to be his future disciples, some performed the pilgrimage with him. These included seminal scholars and Sufis like the first Ottoman mufti Molla Fenari (d. 1431), and convent-founding Sufis, eventually, of Anatolia like Abd al-Latif al-Maqdisi (d. 1452) and Abd al-Rahim al-Marzifoni (fl. 1450). In the course of a pilgrimage travel, Khwafi was able to acquire brilliant disciples who would establish his fame in lands he never been to, including the Anatolia under the then-emerging Ottoman dynasty. Also in the same while he compiled books that elaborated his doctrine to be copied and learned by students. The pilgrimage, therefore, was much more than a personal accomplishment in piety especially for a grand Sufi living in a rather remote corner of Islamdom. Contemporary historian Ibn Hajar notes how Khwafi’s fame immensely increased after this pilgrimage. In addition to highlighting the centrality of the Hajj and the sites on the Hajj route in the growth of Sufi doctrines and communities, this paper compares distant parts of Islamdom to raise questions on such issues as Islamic universalism in the fifteenth century; fluidity and loyalty within intellectual networks; and Sufis’ attitudes regarding the society around them.

Soon after the Fatawa Hindiyya was compiled in India under emperor Aurangzeb in the late 17th century, Ottoman jurists used this Indian fatwa compilation as an authoritative source in substantiating their jurisprudential opinions. Both Mughal and Ottomans legal scholars drew on earlier works such as the fourteenth-century Indian Fatawa Tatarhinyya and the twelfth-century Central Asian Fatawa Qadikhan. This paper examines the circulation of legal knowledge between otherwise two separate and disparate early modern Islamic empires: The Ottomans and the Mughals. This paper contributes to the early modern scholarship on Islamic world by emphasizing the Ottoman and Mughal legal scholars’ awareness of one another, their interconnectedness, and their contribution to the formation and accumulation of a universal Hanafi legal scholarship.

Within the field of diplomatic history, scholars are heeding calls to write a connected history of diplomacy across diverse political and temporal boundaries. Their efforts have fostered robust interest in studying early modern diplomacies in their own right. Analyses of more than the basic contours of early modern diplomatic relations in the ‘Islamicate’ world, however, remain limited. This paper aims to capture the sophistication and complexity of early eighteenth century diplomatic relations between two culturally related polities, and in so doing, contribute to broader initiatives intended to build a more global history of diplomatic relations across place and time. My paper takes as its object of study, Ottoman diplomatic relations with Iran on the eve of the collapse of the Safavid dynasty (1719), through the Hotaki interlude, and until the normalization of relations with Nadir Shah (1746). It focuses on Ottoman diplomatic ceremonial and ritual practices performed at the imperial capital and in Iran, through which Ottomans mediated relations with their Iranian counterparts. My analysis illuminates the symbolic meaning of these practices and the particular values and visions that underpinned them. It also characterizes certain continuities and changes in Ottoman-Iranian diplomatic relations throughout the rapid dynastic changes that occurred within Iran during the first half of the eighteenth century. Through critical reading of te?rifat defterleri (registers of protocol and etiquette) from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, sefaretnames (travel reports) and letters of Ottoman envoys to Iran throughout this period, and contemporary vak’anüvis tarihleri (official histories) that detail encounters with Iranian diplomats, I advance two main arguments. First, diplomacy was an essential component of Ottoman politics, as evidenced by the coherent and elaborate diplomatic etiquette and protocol to which they adhered. Through ceremony and ritual, Ottomans were able to simultaneously communicate their military might, cultural sophistication, and religious integrity to outsiders, while also engaging in the kind of self-imagining that was integral to their own identity. Second, each encounter -- whether for the purposes of delivering letters to the Iranian court, giving gifts, participating in entertainment activities, or permitting an audience with the Sultan -- was an arena for claiming relative status vis-à-vis their Iranian rivals. When scrutinized, the array of ceremonies and rituals associated with each of these encounters, indicate clearly that the last Safavids of the early eighteenth century, the Hotakis, and Nadir Shah all saw the Ottoman Sultan as the ultimate arbiter of trans-imperial affairs within the 'Islamicate' world.

After the initial seventh-century conquest of the Middle East, an estimated half the world’s Christians fell under Muslim rule. The Qur’an identifies Christians as “People of the Book” by virtue of their possession of a written scripture and includes commands for their treatment as dhimmi, or protected people. Following 9/11, there was a flood of literature purporting to historicize the inevitable clash between “crescent and cross.” Recently, scholars have begun to focus on non-confrontational contact between the people of the two faiths in the early centuries of Islam. Scholarship on the interaction of the Christian Bible and Muslin Qur’an, however, has been largely limited to textual commonalities and contradictions. Comparative scholarship on the codices themselves has been limited to the theory that Muslims chose a horizontal (landscape) orientation for their written scripture as a means of differentiating the Qur’an from the vertical (portrait) orientation of Christian Bibles. This paper approaches Christian and Muslim written scriptures as material objects and as nodes of cultural intersection between the two faiths, and seeks to situate early Qur’an codices in the multi-confessional societies in which they were produced. During the eighth and ninth centuries, Qur’an production in the Middle East was remarkably stable and therefore provides firm and fertile ground for comparison to contemporary Christian biblical manuscripts. This paper is based on my study of several hundred Qur’an manuscripts, as well as digitized and published images of Byzantine Gospels and Lectionaries produced in the eighth through the tenth centuries. Even though Muslims exclude representations of humans, the similarities between Christian and Muslim scriptures are striking, including both ornamental elements as well as page layout, and, in particular, the use of negative space. Such resemblances strongly suggest bibliographic influences between the two communities. While the absence of colophons as well as the intrinsic mobility of books make it impossible to determine the exact circumstances in which these Qur’ans were produced, the material evidence found in the codices is buttressed by textual evidence. Abd al-Razzaq (d. 826), Abu Ubayd (d. 838), and Ibn Abi Dawud (d. 928) all include in their literary works eighth-century legal debates on the probity of Christians copying Qur’an manuscripts as well as the rectitude of adding ornament to the books, which is common in biblical texts. My paper argues that embedded in both the debates and the codices is tantalizing evidence of remarkable cross-cultural interaction in early Islamic Qur’an production.