Studies on the social and cultural histories of monarchy address the ways that monarchs and dynastic institutions coloured the worldviews and experiences of humans, animals, and other beings which inhabited their imperial domains. In this connection, recent scholarship on the institutional practice of monarchy has highlighted the importance of hunting and of interaction with animals to the court cultures of world history. While aspects of this tradition are not absent from work on the Ottoman dynasty, the relationship between sovereignty and the stewardship of animals in the Ottoman Empire has received little attention. What then might Ottoman perspectives on their emperor’s interactions with animals tell us about his role in shaping the natural world beyond the immediate purview of human affairs? In response to this question, this paper explores the relationship between imperial sovereignty, hunting, and animal stewardship in the context of the Ottoman imperial court society (Dergah-i Ali) of the late seventeenth century. Based on a genre-spanning analysis of hunting narratives penned by elite Ottoman men who wrote about or travelled with the Ottoman “court out of doors,” namely those contained in Abdurrahman Abdi Pa?a’s (d. 1692) Veqayiname, Evliya Çelebi’s (c. 1611-81) Seyahatname, and Mustafa Naima Efendi’s (1655-1715) Ravzat ul-Huseyn fi Hulasat-i Ahbar el-Hafiqeyn, I argue that Ottoman descriptions of Sultan Mehmed IV’s (r. 1648-87) participation in the imperial hunt (sayd u shikar) reveal a shared conception of sultanic prowess based on competent engagement with animals. In each case, the emperor and his actions are judged based on his ability to see the workings of God in the animal world and legislate life and death accordingly as he traversed the forests and plains of his realm in his mobile court complex (Otag-i Humayun). By virtue of their references to “spiritually-guiding cows,” slaughtered stags that resemble seditious “rebels,” and skillful rabbits deserving of mercy, I maintain that these authors conceived of the Ottoman sultan’s interactions with non-human animals as an indication of his fitness to rule over humans as well. In this way, the authors hint at a discursive link between human and animal “subjects” as well as between worldly sovereignty and access to the Divine Order.

It is commonly accepted that the period following the destruction of the Abbasid Caliphate produced a new framework for the relationship between the religious elite and dynastic courts. Generally speaking, this era witnessed the increased princely patronage of the ‘ulama and the Sufis, as well as a much wider interest in mystical and esoteric knowledge compared to earlier periods. These changes in the broader circumstances of religion and piety, coupled with Sufism’s own transformations in the period, resulted in the emergence of Sufi communities that coalesced around individual figures and chains (silsila). The period is also well-known for engendering a number of sunni dynasties that sought to patronize Islamic learning, in part, as a way to buttress their legitimacy. Devoid of a universal caliph who conferred titles and therefore authority, these military dynasties increasingly turned to supporting mystical piety, which act would help project them as deserving of their claims to Divine sanction. This paper will try to address the simultaneous emergence of a type of Sufism that claimed to embody the spiritual legacy of the Prophet Muhammad. In the absence of a caliph succeeding the Prophet, these military dynasties sought to cement ties to the kinds of Sufis that claimed spiritual descent from the Prophet in addition to serving the Sunni-Jama`i political ideals. The Sufis of this kind were characterized by these features: i) they connected all aspects of their Sufism directly to the Prophet, ii) they commanded a large international following; ii) they claimed access to the unseen and the esoteric; iii) they demonstrated a strong sense of society and political order. The most paradigmatic Sunni ruler of this type of a relationship in the fifteenth century was the Timurid ruler Shahrukh (r. 1405-1447), who patronized Sufism particularly in Khorasan and Transoxania. In this paper, I will examine the relationship between Shahrukh and a number of prominent Sufis of Herat, his capital, in an attempt to illuminate the development of the aforementioned type of Sufi piety that I call Muhammadan Sufism. Building on the recent works of Erik Ohlander, Daphna Ephrat, and Shahzad Bashir, I will focus on the writings and activities of these Sufis, discussing how their view of Sufism that was firmly anchored in the Prophetic model served the ideals of the Shahrukhid government.

My paper examines the apocalyptic Epic literature (adab al-malahim) which are usually attributed to (pseudo-)historical characters such as the prophet Danyal, Ali b. Abi Talib, or Ibn Uqb (who was supposedly the teacher of the grandsons of the Prophet al-?asan and al-?usayn). These malahim often contain predictions about the fate of certain wars, persons, the world, or even a mix between these topics. The number of these works were significantly boomed starting from the 13th century. This might be explained by arguing that the shock of the fall of the Abbasid caliphate has influenced the mentality of the Islamic world and paved the way for eschatological expectations to rise. However, the famous scholar Ibn Taymiyah in his criticism of the malahim genre mentions that these works were circulating during the reign of Nur al-Din Zengi (d.1174 CE) which shows, if true, that this answer might be too simplistic. Anyhow, as historiographical works of this era attest, and as I would argue in this paper, these malahim played a bigger role in shaping the events of the post-Mongol invasion of the Islamic East than a modern mind would imagine. The focus of this paper will be on the famous malhamah of Ibn Uqb, which there were at least 7 versions of it circulating in Damascus in the early 14th century (and I managed to actually find dozens of its copies in manuscript form which were (re)produced between the Fatimid till the late Ottoman period). My starting point would be proposing a preliminary approach to estimate the era of their production and the location of which they were written. Hence, we can better understand their aims, functions, and the groups which they produced the “forged prophecies” in those malahim. By tackling the problem of dating these works, and examining the scholarly debates about their authenticity, this paper also aims in the first place to show the usefulness of these often neglected works as sources for the social, intellectual, and political history of the medieval period. Furthermore, this paper will discuss the question of authorship in the thriving (and perhaps the unprecedented) "writerly culture" of medieval Damascus and Cairo. Its main argument is that these works allowed a broader sector of both scholars and “outsiders” from the scholarly networks to shape the socio-political arena as they provided them with a gate to access the inapproachable world of scholarly production through “un-authored” works.