?afr, the Islamic esoteric genre of eschatologically loaded apocalyptic import par excellence, constitutes a barely breached subject among Ottoman scholars. Arguably, ?afr experienced its heyday under the Ottomans, especially between the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries; it is a supernatural class of texts that served to bolster Ottoman claims to supreme Islamic cosmocracy. As an Islamic revelatory genre in the service of empire, it is hence a testament to what Cornell Fleischer identifies as a shared Mediterranean “historical idiom” that was “highly transferable and universally understood” (“A Mediterranean Apocalypse,” p. 80). For specialists of Ottoman intellectual history, however, focus has generally been placed on understanding economics, the advent of Sunni orthodoxy, military and war, as well as statecraft and diplomacy. Islamic intellectual history should include ?afr as a key genre in the catalogue of relevant texts. To that end, this paper first provides an historical outline of the development of ?afr and its introduction, arguably via Sufi circles, into the Ottoman world. In particular, the Comprehensive Prognosticon (al-?afr al-?a?mi?, MS. Süleymaniye Ktp. Laleli 1532) by Mu?ammad b. T?alh?ah (d. 642/1254) is examined at length. Second, the Key to the Comprehensive Prognosticon (mifta?h? al-?ifr al-?a?mi?, MSS. Süleymaniye Ism. Ef. 280; BnF Paris 2669) by ?Abd al-Rah?ma?n al-Bist?a?mi? (d. 858/1454) is presented as an early example of a new Ottoman esoteric textual tradition. Despite the derivative nature of al-Bist?a?mi?’s work, for the Ottomans it served as a primary text of apocalyptic power and transcendental insights in its own right. Third, the apocryphal Ottoman apocalypse The Tree of Nu?ma?n (al-Ša?arah al-nu?ma?niyyah) attributed to Ibn al-?Arab? is examined. This text is important because it auto-categorizes itself as belonging to the genre of ?afr. In this light, one may identify an intellectual awareness of a taxonomically distinct body of literature. Equally important, in presenting The Tree of Nu?ma?n I will argue for an approximate dating of composition in the late sixteenth~mid-seventeenth century. In short, this paper makes a critical contribution to the nascent wave of scholarly interest in Ottoman esotericism and apocalypticism by examining the historical chain of ?afr literature, two key ?afr texts from the early modern period, as well as their centrality in the world of Ottoman eschatological enthusiasm.

From the fourteenth to the end of the seventeenth century, cosmographical treatises dominated Ottomans’ understanding of geography. This genre of scholarship served as an encyclopedia of its time and its impact continued well into the seventeenth century, influencing the works of Ottoman intellectuals like Mustafa Ali, Mehmed A??k and Katip Çelebi. Katip Çelebi’s translation of one of the first European atlases, Atlas Minor, introduced the new geographical genre to the Ottoman intellectual world. This paper traces the introduction of atlas to the Ottoman Empire and its rise in the seventeenth century, focusing on change and continuity in approaching and presenting geographical knowledge. This paper demonstrates that atlas presents a new way to organize geographical knowledge regarding the shift from four elements (anas?r-? erbaa) to continental geography (k?ta co?rafyas?), while maintaining aspects of cosmographical tradition. The history of atlas parallels the change in audience, readership and accessibility of knowledge, which is greatly in line with the relationship between text and image. Accordingly, representations of the world, such as the Typus Orbis Terrarum (a two sphered depiction of the old and new world), or the integration of the three-dimensional globe to the two-dimensional atlas epitomizes the text and image issue in the European and Ottoman copies of Atlas Minor. Approaching atlas from the lens of genre provides broader conversations with other geographies, as well as academic disciplines. Moving beyond Ottoman particularism, it contributes to the history of geographical thought as well as intellectual history and the history of the book.

For centuries, the vast Ottoman post station network that connected Crimea to Cairo and Belgrade to Baghdad served imperial couriers and officials exclusively, providing lodging, meals, and horses as they delivered everything from imperial decrees and villagers’ petitions to intelligence reports. Yet, there are few written records of post station operations until after the 1690s, when an empire-wide reform of the Ottoman post station system generated an unprecedented volume of postal operations records. Among this avalanche of new documentation is the Post Station Register (menzil defteri), which collated discrete fiscal data of every single post station in the empire and listed them according to their geographical location along the routes plied by imperial couriers. Previous scholars have extracted financial data within these registers in order to shed light on postal system usage and the changing volume of communications-related traffic. Nevertheless, there are pertinent methodological challenges to the scholar interested in using its numerical data, as it is not clear if the general trend of increased expenses and courier traffic across time reflects a real increase on the ground, or merely a more aggressive administrative attitude towards recording and reporting expenses. This paper approaches this same historical source with a different methodology. Using genre theory, it asks a different question of the Post Station Register: what kinds of new information did the late seventeenth-century Ottoman fiscal scribe want to know? And what does this new information tell us about the Ottoman bureaucratic logic or mentalité? By closely analyzing MAD 4030, an early example of a Post Station Register, this paper delineates the Ottoman fiscal bureaucracy’s novel attempt to bring its sprawling imperial postal system under separate management. Whereas previously, the postal system had been indirectly administrated through the empire’s taxation system, as evidenced by its records in tax registers, after the 1690s, the postal system was ‘peeled’ away and managed autonomously, and the emergence of the Post Station Register is the tangible evidence of this administrative reorganization.

Salnames, both the provincial and imperial ones, are used widely by Ottoman historians to mine information such as governmental structure, demographics, and economic circumstances. The first Baghdad salname was published in 1875, including a wealth of knowledge about the structure of the provincial government as well as its history. Using the 22 issues of Baghdad salname as a case study, this paper discusses how considering the salname as a transferable and transmutable global administrative genre can tell us about the means and processes of production and dissemination of knowledge in the Ottoman Empire and beyond. This paper proposes three avenues to study an administrative genre; first, an administrative genre can be discussed through study of the structure and format. This paper argues that the changes and consistencies in the format of the provincial salname signals both the constraints of the genre as well as local innovations due to the specific needs of the provincial government in Baghdad. Second, close textual analysis of the text of the whole body of the Baghdad salnames published from 1875 to 1909 reveals immense production and accumulation of knowledge about the province. The salnames were published by the provincial administrative elite, most of whom were trained in the newly established schools during the Tanzimat era. This paper thus argues that salnames as a genre and historical source are one of our best insights into the structure and concerns of the provincial administration as opposed to the central Ottoman state and its dominant archive. Third, in contextualizing the Baghdad salnames in the wider context of provincial salnamas within the Empire and other iterations of this genre globally, this paper argues that modern administrative genres came into existence due to evolving technological advances and new concerns in terms of governance. The first Ottoman salname was inspired by the French state annual reports. The genre travelled to Iran after the Qajar Shah travelled to Baghdad and Europe in 1870s. The Baghdad salnames appeared after the governorship of Midhat Pasa in the province, who brought the genre with him from the birthing region of Ottoman provincial salnames, the Balkans. This paper, therefore, demonstrates that through considering the format, text, and context of an administrative genre we can trace local, imperial, and global networks of production and dissemination of knowledge in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In the wake of the First World War, Arabs embarked on a critical reexamination of the final decades of Ottoman rule in the Middle East. Their efforts, which would shape the collective memory of the region for the next century, took two forms: the publication of Arab memoirs and the “translation” of Turco-Ottoman memoirs into Arabic. This paper highlights a corpus of memoirs (mudhakkir?t) released by the Beirut newspaper Al-Ahrar and publishing house Dar Sadir in the 1930s, works the editors claimed revealed the secrets of Turkish Ottoman intelligence officials stationed in the Arab provinces during a painful final chapter of shared history. The proliferation of memoir as a legible Arabic genre in the interwar period carried with it certain expectations of authenticity. But “placing social value on…authenticity,” in the words of critic Louis Menand, “is an invitation to manufacture [it].” Indeed, the memoirs here considered were fabricated--in full or in part. The memoirs elicited a strong response from Arab readers, thanks to both their inflammatory content and the authoritative enemy sources from which they supposedly derived. Real or not, they brought to light old schisms festering beneath the surface of societies preoccupied with a new struggle against European colonial rule. The changing political landscape had recast the ethical bounds of collaboration. Arab readers and writers reflecting on the recent past thus found themselves navigating profound moral ambiguities: Who was a patriot and who a traitor? Through Al-Ahrar’s publications, curated by Lebanese editor Fuad Maydani, this paper interrogates the role Ottoman memoirs played in constructing alternative Arab histories of World War I. How, it then asks, was this process complicated by the problem of (in)authenticity? What were the stakes of fakes? The answer rests on an inquiry into not only the production of the texts in question, but also on readers’ nuanced engagement with them. Though quick to cast doubt on the provenance of certain memoirs, Arab readers in the 1930s remained hungry for new voices. In laying claim to memoir as a valid, if contestable form of truth-telling, they thus set the stage to circumvent official monopolies on history. This paper argues for us, in turn, to recalibrate our horizons of expectation as readers, and to recognize not only the perils of fakes but also their possibilities.