The sixteenth century witnessed the production of a series of biographical dictionaries of poets, known by the generic title tezkire, which first gave pride of place to Ottoman literary achievements. A fundamental aim of these early biographical dictionaries was to provide a curriculum of authorial models, as the work of certain poets was privileged over that of others. At the same time, writings on poetics and lexicons in verse also were singled out for study. The pedagogical aspect of these biographical dictionaries, however, has often been overlooked in scholarly assessments. The paper focuses on the standards promoted in one biographical dictionary, that of A??k Çelebi. His tezkire is the most important initial effort to delineate a distinctive Ottoman curriculum, and laid the groundwork for subsequent elaborations. In addition, the paper situates A??k Çelebi’s tezkire in the context of an expanding literary public and addresses the question of what constituted appropriate literacy. His effort to delineate a distinctive Ottoman curriculum, as will be argued, rested on motivations that were as clearly social as well as aesthetic.

This paper examines the use of sources in Birgivi Mehmed Efendi’s (1523-1573) al-Tariqa al-muhammadiyya. The work in question is a manual of practical ethics written by a sixteenth-century Ottoman preacher, jurist and religious scholar, whose ideas would rise to great popularity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, inspiring a number of ‘revivalist’ movements and thinkers. Through a close textual study of parts of al-Tariqa al-muhammadiyya (in particular Birgivi’s discussion of the ‘vice of sanctimony’), I will examine how and what Birgivi read, as well as what ‘reading’ might have meant for him in the first place. Among other things, this will include a consideration of how and what Birgivi quoted, as well as when and how he didn’t quote, how and what he paraphrased, and so on. The question of what he didn’t read, but received through other (probably oral) channels will be examined, too. The paper will thus shed light on a number of issues broadly related to the complex of orality, literacy, reading practices and the transmission of knowledge in early modern Islamic thought. In fact, Birgivi’s Tariqa lends itself nicely to an examination of these questions because it is such a true work of synthesis: had?th-heavy, and at times quite legalistic (indebted to a relatively under-studied tradition of post-classical H?anaf? fatawa literature), it shows a clear emphasis on a particular form of sober Sufism, reminiscent of pietistic works such as al-Makk?’s Q?t al-qul?b and Ab? al-Layth al-Samarqand?’s Tanb?h al-gh?fil?n. Most interestingly, however, as I will argue, is Birgivi’s unacknowledged indebtedness to classical adab. His adoption of materials from anthologies such as Ibn ‘Abd al-Rabbih’s al-‘Iqd al-far?d, al-Qazw?n?’s Muf?d al-‘ul?m or al-Ibsh?h?’s Mustat?raf, which he might or might not have ‘read’ in person, can inform us, I believe, of practices of the transmission of knowledge in early modern Ottoman religious circles. By way of a detailed case study, the paper will thus shed light on some of the processes at work in this transmission and production of knowledge—of how an early modern Ottoman ‘alim read, selected and synthesized material from various strands of the Islamic tradition—how his ‘reading’ worked in concrete terms and how it informed the creation of a ‘new’ and original presentation of the ‘old.’

Ottoman manuscript libraries teem with personal poetic miscellanies (mecmua) from all periods but these have hardly received scholarly attention except as vessels that may contain variants of a sought-after poem. However, studying any particular miscellany as a “moment” in its own right can be greatly rewarding for a historian of literacy and reading. Paying attention to the choice of poems and poets, juxtaposition of different pieces, page layout and orthographical peculiarities can help us reach conclusions about the poetic taste of the compiler and his social milieu. At the same time, we may attain clues as to his motivations for compiling such a miscellany and the kind of use he made of it. Why would a sixteenth-century Ottoman lover of poetry collect poems and write them down? Because he liked them and was likely to desire reading them again? And would he “read” as we moderns do, as a passive consumer/receiver seeking aesthetic pleasure? An examination of a series of personal poetic mecmuas from the period has shown that in most cases the compiler of the mecmua himself was a practicing poet, and not just a “reader”. One often comes across poems by the compiler (“poem by this poor one”) among material by others. It seems that the main motivation for the compilers was to collect material that could be used to create new poems. Juxtaposition of items similar from a compositional point of view (same rhyme word, same metaphor, etc.) suggests that, like motif books used by artists and craftsmen, poetic miscellanies served to build up the compiler’s "copia" in the Renaissance sense of the term. They can, indeed, be compared to medieval and Renaissance commonplace books, which provided readied formulaic material for the rhetor/author’s convenience. Variations on a conventional stock of tropes, rhymes and especially redifs are the chief “spolia” to be garnered from the poems recorded. In other words, poems are thought of as modular assemblages that can be segmented back into their (reusable) elements. The mecmuas studied, therefore, point to a world where the “reader” and “author” functions have not yet become separate. This impression is born out by the biographical dictionaries of the period, where we find that the audience receiving one’s verse was mainly made up of other poets and not a passively consuming audience of an anonymous nature.

The debate on vernacular literacy in seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire During the seventeenth century vernacular literacy gained a greater visibility in the Ottoman world of letters. One manifestation of this development was the proliferation of texts that were written expressly for a lay readership, including among them catechisms (ilmihal) and books of advice (nasihatnames, pendnames, etc.) In several such texts, the writers also discussed whom they considered “literate” and whom “illiterate” as well as what they made of those urban folk who could read only in the Turkish vernacular or who aspired to learn Persian without having first mastered Arabic and the religiolegal learning transmitted in that language. Through a contextualized study of these texts, this paper explores how the growing importance of lay readership informed Ottoman understandings of “literacy,” and “illiteracy” and elicited a new debate about the value of vernacular literacy. It is argued that the distinctions Ottoman literati made between the “lettered” (‘alim) and the “unlettered” (ümmi) reflected not just differences in literacy skills but also religious and social anxieties provoked by the emergence of a new reading public that was socially more diverse and distinctively more “urbane” (?ehri) in its ethos. This paper is structured in three parts. In the first part, we shall look specifically at a hitherto overlooked catechism, the Mebhas-? ?man written by a little-known sufi and scholar, Nushi en-Nasihi ca. 1633. This text offers a particularly extended discussion of elementary instruction and lay literacy in early seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire. It also offers some novel views on how best to guide the lay public through the written medium. In the second part of this paper, we shall expand our scope to take stock of similar views expressed by other seventeenth-century literati such as Abdülmecit Sivasi, Katip Çelebi and Mehmed Nazmi. In the concluding section, we shall offer some views about how the growing importance of lay readership and the elite responses to it also informed the so-called sufi-Kad?zadeli controversy about “innovations” (bid‘at), which unravelled during the same period.