Over the last decade, one has witnessed a remarkable increase in the number of studies that uncover aspects of scholarly activities during the early modern Ottoman period. Despite their contribution to our understanding of Ottoman intellectual history, many of them have exclusively focused on Istanbul, with the assumption that it was the main hub of learning in the Empire, along with being its political center. Acknowledging the importance of Istanbul-based scholarship in developing new insights for the field, however, this panel focuses on different geographies of the Empire, scrutinizing examples in which roles the 'center' and 'peripheries' played in the making of early modern Ottoman intellectual life are interrelated and dialectically transformative. The panel's papers propose revisionist perspectives regarding such issues as interplay between knowledge and sovereignty, impact of 'periphery-based' scholars on the flourishing and sustaining of various sciences, transmission of knowledge and establishment of epistemic networks across the Ottoman lands, and ways in which political fluctuations could affect scholars' mobility. They also emphasize that intellectual, linguistic, geographical, and political diversity were among the major characteristics of early modern Ottoman intellectual life.
The first paper focuses on a career decision and the subsequent relocation of Molla Fenari (d. 1431) in order to question his "Ottomanness," which has long been considered by early modern Ottoman(izing) biographers and modern historians, vs. the intellectual independence he assigned to himself in his relation to the political authority. The second paper discusses the Ottoman reception of Ali al-Qushji's (d. 1474) astronomical works in order to stress that science was studied in multiple languages, and that science education was a way of establishing scholarly networks across the Empire. The third paper explores how a circle of polymath scholars in Ottoman Kurdistan reached the imperial judicial-educational hierarchy amidst the backdrop of seventeenth-century crises, by visualizing, through digital mappings, their mobility, patronage system, and network relations across the Empire. The fourth paper scrutinizes Müneccimbashi Ahmed Dede's (d. 1702) scholarly activities in Mecca and Medina in order to remark connections between the Turkish speaking (Rum) and Arabic speaking parts of the Empire, and how interconnected these intellectual milieus were. In order to support their arguments, the papers use various types of analysis, including close and distant readings of contemporary biographical dictionaries and scientific textbooks, prosopographic analysis through digital mappings, and content- and context-based examination of the mobility of scholars and knowledge.
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Mehmet Emin Gulecyuz
Molla Fenari (d. 1431), admittedly one of the most influential scholars of the nascent Ottoman sultanate, did not hesitate to leave his hometown Bursa, the then Ottoman capital city, upon the Timurid victory over Yildirim Bayezid’s forces in Ankara (1402) and the disintegration of the latter’s intended imperial enterprise. Prior to the Battle of Ankara, Fenari was an acclaimed professor and the judge of Bursa, a bureaucratic position on top of its scholarly attachments. The failure of the Ottoman enterprise, which was later dubbed as “interregnum” from a teleological perspective, had not then shown signs of temporariness and was quite possibly seen by many as an absolute decay. Since Bursa, once home to Fenari’s academic and judicial career, was now a place of no political and social stability, the scholar sought an alternative safe harbor. That safe harbor was the land of Karaman, whose imprisoned ruler Me?med Bey had just been freed by Timur and thus set out to restore his principality from its ashes in the central lands of the bygone Seljuks.
Fenari’s writings from the period and a critical review of the so-called “Ottoman interregnum” suggest an alternative perspective for understanding the intellectual authority that the scholars of the time, among whom Fenari, claimed to hold in their relation to the political authority. Accordingly, the man of knowledge enjoyed a sovereignty that is not only parallel to, but in many respects above the political authority, which is seen as nothing other than the guarantor of the social order pragmatically needed for one’s maintaining his scholarship without interruption.
My presentation consists of three parts. First, I will summarize the consequences of Timur’s Anatolian campaign and the politico-geographical scene of its aftermath for Molla Fenari. This will explain his decision to move his whole intellectual activity to Karaman and what this relocation might have involved. Secondly, I will look at what Fenari wrote in Karaman and how it sheds light unto the scholar’s expectations from the political authority as well as his conception of the sovereignty of knowledge. Finally, I will reflect on how later Ottoman historiography, primarily under the influence of Tashkoprizade’s Ottomanizing program, tends to downplay, or simply ignore, the significance of Fenari’s Karaman sojourn, thus indicating the transforming notions of the relationship between the intellectual and the political spheres from late medieval to early modern times.
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Dr. Hasan Umut
This paper aims to explore linguistic and geographical complexities of the education of theoretical astronomy (ilm al-hay'a) in the early modern Ottoman Empire. By focusing on the Ottoman reception of two works, entitled Risalah dar hay'ah and al-Risala al-Fathiyya, written by Ali al-Qushji (d. 1474), one of the most eminent Timurid scholars, who died in Istanbul a few years after he emigrated there upon the invitation of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II (d. 1481), I will reveal that Ottoman learners studied theoretical astronomy in different languages including Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, within various geographical, intellectual, scientific, and institutional contexts. In other words, I will remark that one of the main characteristics of astronomy education in the early modern Ottoman period was linguistic and spatial diversity, the reason of which should be related to different social, intellectual, professional and political individuals and groups with various motivations to study astronomy. I will also emphasize that since Qushji’s works were studied in multiple geographies of the Empire, it can safely be argued that science education was among the mediums through which networks of Ottoman and non-Ottoman scholars were established. These interesting phenomena lead us to ask further questions: In astronomy education in the Ottoman context, under which circumstances a language was preferred to another? More specifically, what were the intellectual, pedagogical, linguistic, and political dynamics when Ottoman readers of Qushji’s astronomy preferred one of his texts to another one to study or translate? By offering answers to them and asking further questions regarding what I call linguistic and geographical plurality in early modern Ottoman astronomy, my paper aims to contribute to the literature of Ottoman intellectual history from the history of science perspective.
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Mr. Fikri Cicek
Recent scholarly works on the circulation of scholar-bureaucrats in the Ottoman imperial hierarchy have observed that a limited number of families dominated top-level judicial positions, such as the grand muftiate and chief judgeships in Rumelia and Anatolia during early modern Ottoman history. According to this view, dignitary judges and professors of the law (mevali) formed an elite circle, whose privileged members could confer their social status to their sons. These appointees were required to have graduated from select imperial colleges rather than an ijazah from a particular professor of law. In a gradual process, imperial colleges in Istanbul, Edirne, Bursa became monopolized nearly all judicial-educational appointments in the high-ranking bureaucratic positions.
Rather than focusing on a small group of Istanbulite ulama families, who occupied the very summit of judicial-educational appointments, this paper offers a prosopographic exploration of a provincial ulama circle in Diyar-i Kurd (Kurdistan), from whom many reached the imperial judicial-educational hierarchy in the first half of the seventeenth century and marked an indelible imprint on the scholarly formation of following generations of Ottoman Ulama Hierarchy.
Early seventeenth-century Ottoman Kurdistan, particularly Diyarbakir, was a hub of learning, gave room to those polymath scholars interested in not only in Islamic sciences but also in the natural sciences. These polymath scholars soon caught the attention of Ottoman sultans, governors, and grand muftis, who vigorously worked with them on the unprecedented fiscal, judicial, and educational challenges throughout the empire.
In this paper, I will contextualize the rise of polymath-scholars from Ottoman Kurdistan amidst the backdrop of seventeenth-century crises, which became great opportunities for this group. This paper also aims to identify the sophisticated patronage system between provincial-background scholars and mevali-background scholars in the capital, questioning the extent to which this new circle of polymath scholars from Kurdistan challenged and shaped the politics of Ulama between the 1610s and 1660s. Finally, this study will offer a prosopographic analysis through digital mappings in order to understand better geographic, social, and bureaucratic mobility of provincial scholars from Ottoman Kurdistan to the imperial ulama hierarchy.
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One of the most persistent disjunctures that prevailed in the Ottoman studies has been that which is between the center and provinces. The bureaucratic organization of the statecraft, as well as the persistence of various regional peculiarities from language to local political organization may justify this departmentalization to a certain degree. However, there were also many other frameworks that conjoined seemingly dispersed people and ideas. The sufi orders and a shared scholarly ethos were two of such frameworks and the seventeenth century Ottoman historian and scholar Müneccimbashi Ahmed Dede’s (d.1702) life can be read within these frameworks.
Müneccimbashi is primarily known by his encyclopedic universal history that he started while employed as chief astrologer at the court of Mehmed IV. However, he passed the last decade of his life in Cairo, Mecca, and Medina and died as the sheikh of the Mevlevi convent in Mecca. His emigration was mainly due to the vicissitudes of politics in Istanbul rather than maybe scholarly or spiritual pursuits but eventually these years proved to be his most fruitful period, when he met a number of prominent Arab scholars including Ahmad al-Nakhli and Ibrahim al-Kurani, and tutored his own students. Most of his intellectual production are dated to this period, and they include the Arabic translation of Isam al-din Isfarayani (d. 1537)’s Persian treatise on metaphor and a commentary on it which seems to be extensively read, an extended commentary on Adud al-din al-Iji’s (d. 1355) tractate on ethics as well as shorter treatises on Quranic exegesis and mathematics intended for the use of his students.
At the turn of the eighteenth century Mecca and Medina were cosmopolitan towns with pilgrims streaming from all over the Muslim world and as such they functioned as intellectual hubs as well. This critical role of Hejaz has been better demonstrated for the eighteenth century when novel intellectual and political currents arouse from scholarly networks based there. Moreover, recent intellectual histories of the Ottoman Empire have started to adopt a broader perspective that is much more sensitive to the movement of people and ideas across geographies. Along the same lines, an account of Müneccimbashi’s scholarly activities will shed light on the connections between the Turkish speaking (Rum) and Arabic speaking parts of the Empire and help to answer questions like to what degree and in what ways these two intellectual milieus across the Empire were interconnected.
