This multi-panel session seeks to investigate the creation, projection, reception, negotiation, contestation, and transformation of Ottoman identity over the long history of the empire's existence. The Ottoman Empire offers the rare opportunity to trace the transformations of identity from the pre-modern to the early-modern and then to the modern era. Identity is a slippery concept that must be determined empirically on a case by case basis and is anything but static. As a polyglot and incredibly heterogeneous empire, the concept of being Ottoman experienced many changes and adaptations. The purpose of this multi-panel session is to trace the development, transformations, and expansion of Ottoman identity not only from a central imperial perspective and ideological projection, but also to see how this identity was adopted, adapted, rejected, and contested by subjects, rivals, allies, and foes alike in the Ottoman sphere of influence.
Panel II traces the transformation of Ottoman identity as a result of its rapid expansion through conquest and the investment in resources to incorporate various territories and peoples into its imperial structure. Paper 1 begins with the view at the center as expressed by Kemalpashazade who defined in the early 16th century what it meant to be a good Ottoman, and his writings were instrumental in defining an imperial religious culture in the empire. Paper 2 explores the issue of Ottoman identification with Sunni orthodoxy by analyzing the struggle against the Kizilbash whose persecution went beyond neutralizing the Safavid threat and helped promote religious homogeneity and imperial control in the provinces. Papers 3, 4 and 5 all analyze how territories formerly ruled by the Mamluks, the Arab lands, were redefined as Ottoman after 1516/17. Paper 3 traces the fortunes of three families in Aintab revealing that families which collaborated on the local level with the interests of the Ottoman government reaped benefits and flourished for centuries. Paper 4 explores the career of a merchant in Aleppo in the first half of the 16th century. Biographical, architectural and legal sources reveal how Arab society evolved under Ottoman rule. Paper 5 explores the manner in which Jerusalem with its religious importance to Christians and Muslims was transformed into an Ottoman city by the construction and endowment of institutions that would advertize its Ottoman identity to locals and visitors alike. As a whole, all the papers reveal that new rivals and conquests elicited new means to forge Ottoman identity throughout Ottoman territories.
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Dr. Leslie Peirce
Abstract text.This paper explores the impact of the Ottoman conquest of 1516-1517 on the city and province of Aintab (Gaziantep). It examines dynamics in the city a generation after Aintab’s incorporation into the empire. At this point in time, it becomes possible to observe individuals adapting to the growing presence of the Ottoman regime in this provincial setting. Some were successful, some were less adept at collaboration with the new imperial overlord.
My paper focuses on the three notable families in the city in 1540, recognizable by their lineage designations: the Sikkakzade, the Demircizade and the Boyac?zade (the Turkish suffix –o?lu—“sons of” or “house of”—appears in the sources as often as the Persian –zade). The latter two lineages survived into the 20th century, while the first appears to have declined by the 17th century. In 1540, however, all three were families with land, and all three can be described as entrepreneurial. But there are signs in the Aintab court records and land-census surveys (tahrir) that suggest why the Boyacis and the Demircis thrived under the Ottomans and why the Sikkaks did not. The argument of the paper is that the two successful families can be described as “Ottoman” because of their ability to cooperate with and, more importantly, exploit the opportunities offered by the new regime.
Studied adaptation was critical in the formation of a provincial Ottoman in the era of conquest. Aintab had been a frontier province before the advent of the Ottomans, traded back and forth among powers competing for hegemony in the northern Syrian region. Thus urban leaders had become used to a certain degree of autonomy, especially in the decades immediately preceding the Ottoman conquest. The conquest certainly meant subordination to imperial policies and networks of control, but it did not mean wholesale domination by Istanbul. If fiscal and legal networks were designed in and directed from Istanbul, it was local actors who made them locally effective. The Boyacis and the Demircis did not directly serve the state, but they helped it profit locally while they in turn profited
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Prof. Ayfer Karakaya-Stump
Mainstream historiography treats the Ottomans’ repressive policies against the Kizilbash primarily as security measures taken within the framework of the Ottoman-Safavid conflict. On closer examination, however, the proposition that the repression of the Kizilbash was little more than a series of security measures reveals itself to be not so obvious as it sounds. Evidence indicates a lack of exact correlation between the level of perceived or real Safavid threat and the intensity of Kizilbash surveillance and persecution. That the repression of the Kizilbash represented something more than mere security concerns is also suggested by its profound impact on the fabric of the society. The moral and religious passion of the Kizilbash hunt was so high that in the long-run it established the Sunni-Alevi bifurcation as the most insurmountable socio-psychological cleavage in Turkish society.
To fully grasp the Ottomans’ anti-Kizilbash campaigns in the sixteenth-century, one must take into account the larger context of Ottomans’ state-building process and their concomitant efforts to refashion the identities and behaviors of the empire’s Muslim subjects along the lines of Sunni orthodoxy. The persecution of the Kizilbash in this context served a number of tangible and symbolic objectives. First off, it helped in the delineation of the otherwise overlapping and diffused religious boundaries that had existed in Anatolia since medieval times, and as such served as a boundary marker for the “true” Islam for which the Ottomans stood. Their unrelenting struggle against the “heretics” also worked as a convenient device for the Ottomans to accentuate their Sunni identity and their commitment to upholding the rule of Sharia. Finally, the Kizilbash surveillance and persecutions affected a vigilance at the popular level for the observance of Sharia, thereby contributing to the religious homogeneity of the Muslim polity, and also shored up the control of the central authority in the provinces.
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Dr. Charles L. Wilkins
With the Ottoman conquest of the Mamluk Sultanate in 1516-17, the central Arab lands (Egypt and the Fertile Crescent), entered a new era in their history justifiably described as Early Modern. Scholarly study of the early Ottoman period (1516-1600) has shed light on the marked expansion of central state power, as demonstrated by urban development initiatives, comprehensive tax surveys of agricultural and commercial activity, judicial reform, and the building of infrastructure to facilitate trade and protect pilgrimage routes. The ways in which local Arab society and culture evolved under early Ottoman rule, however, remain greatly understudied. The noticeable decline, from the late Mamluk Sultanate period, in the production of local historical literature has discouraged historians from undertaking close study of this period. The present study seeks to make a micro-historical contribution to the study of early Ottoman-Arab society by examining the life and career of Ibrahim b. Khidr al-Qaramani (d. 1555), a wealthy, long-distance trader and architectural patron in the north Syrian city of Aleppo. Two sources have long been available for the study of al-Qaramani’s life and work, namely, the biographical dictionary of Ibn al-Hanbali (d. 1562), a contemporary Aleppan scholar and historian, and the socio-historical and architectural survey of Aleppo by another Aleppan, Kamal al-Ghazzi (d. 1933). In 2010 the present researcher discovered a third source, a trove of over thirty documents found in the earliest volumes of the Aleppo law court records, housed in the national archives of Syria. While Ibn al-Hanbali’s biography relates elements of al-Qaramani’s social reputation and public image, and al-Ghazzi his architectural vision and legacy, the court records disclose his strategies and methods as a businessman, and his patriarchal sway as father, husband, and slave owner. From these sources emerges some idea of the power, status, and worldview of merchants in early Ottoman Aleppo.
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Dr. Nabil Al-Tikriti
How did the court and its supporters go about constructing what turned out to be a surprisingly stable Ottoman imperial identity? The palace used many tools, including historical and literary narratives, poetry, and numerous artifacts of material culture. However, during the “Age of Confessionalism” when this hybrid political and religious identity took primary shape, one of the more powerful tools appears to have been kalam texts of religious argumentation. Ibn-i Kemal (d. 1534), also commonly known as Kemalpa?azade, was one of the key players in this respect. In this paper, I will survey Ibn-i Kemal’s kalam texts, placing them in the context of other writers who either participated in the same project, or supplied competing perspectives.
Ibn-i Kemal’s kalam contributions are not unknown, as he authored well over 200 treatises defining the prototypical “good Muslim” (often synonymous with “good Ottoman”). Addressing a range of topics as diverse as the definition of apostasy, proof of God’s existence, licitness of zikr and devran, limits of mystically inspired poverty, legal definition of usury, preferences of the Hanafi madhhab, effects of opium, and several dozen others, Ibn-i Kemal offered a detailed opinion on just about any issue of importance for 16th century Ottoman society.
In order to place his texts in context, I will compare his writings against those of certain rivals and colleagues who wrote on related or identical topics, including Mü’eyyetzade, Sar? Gürz Hamza Efendi, Zenbilli Ali Cemali, Sünbül Sinan, Shams al-Din Jahrami, and Idris-i Bidlisi. Through a broad reading of the articulation of imperial religious culture expressed in these texts, I hope to sound out the driving forces, social parameters, and intellectual justifications behind the construction of an Ottoman Muslim imperial identity in the early 16th century.
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Prof. Amy Singer
Standard accounts of the Ottoman conquest of Jerusalem in 1516 have little to say about the event itself, largely because it occurred with little conflict or upheaval. The city was taken peacefully in the context of the Ottoman march south toward Cairo after the battle of Marj Dabik. Yet a closer examination of the first half-century of Ottoman rule reveals that the Ottomans invested enormous sums and energies in the conquest of Jerusalem, even in the absence of overt military opposition. These expenditures reflect the status of the city, which was disproportionate to the importance of its location, economy and population. As a holy city for Muslims, it drew Ottoman attention, yet its position as a spiritual center for Christians was no less crucial in determining its strategic importance.
Ottoman investments in Jerusalem emphasized its new Ottoman affiliation, and aimed to create a deeper identification of Jerusalem with the Ottomans in the eyes of local residents (urban and rural) and foreigners alike. Thus the Ottomanizing of Jerusalem proceeded at several levels and through different mechanisms. This paper focuses on the impact of construction, endowment, and administrative changes on the city and its hinterlands, in order to explore a particular example of how the Ottomans invested in the process of reshaping identities among the peoples and places they conquered, and in advertising the changes. The Ottoman projects in Jerusalem were only one aspect of a larger process of identity transformation in individuals and places that resulted from the fact of becoming territorially Ottoman. By considering how identities shifted and were reconfigured under the Ottomans, the tensions inherent in the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional Ottoman empire become evident, and suggest new ways of understanding the larger changes affecting the empire over time.
The discussions in this paper are based on Ottoman administrative and judicial archival sources, as well as on a careful examination of the early Ottoman building programme in the city of Jerusalem.
