One of the little understood aspects of Ottoman eclecticism, discussed in historiography mainly with reference to architecture and politics, is how the Ottomans utilized different forms of knowledge to address the socio-political needs of their time. From Ibn Arabi's lettrism and Ikhwan al-Safa's numbers to the wisdom of the ancients, a wide array of inherited knowledge, including occult sciences and sacred history, loomed large in the intellectual repertoire of Ottomans, who weaved it into a new, and at times contested, epistemic and political discourse. By taking the early modern Ottoman context as a case study and examining the reinterpretation/appropriation of diversified arrays of knowledge (ancient myths, mystical cosmologies, astral polemics, proto-ethnologies), this panel sheds light not only on the process of Ottoman knowledge production and practice per se, but on the historical appropriation and classification of knowledge showing that different categories of knowledge were much more porous and integrated than assumed by modern scholarship.
The papers will explore production, dissemination, utility, reception, and the socio-political impact of a wide range of knowledge, including occult knowledge. With regard to the category of occult, we will revisit and challenge the notion that relegates it to pseudo-scientific status, thus diminishing the value of scholarship on the occult in its own right. Ottomans took the occult sciences and sacred history seriously since these strands of knowledge were integral in making sense of their world and constructing socio-political realities.
The first presentation examines how the mythic lore on King Solomon was used in Ottoman pious/political writing in the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries. The universal vocabulary of sacred history lent meaning to the complex and often contested evolution of both mundane and sacral developments, i.e. city-building, sedentarization, sacral kingship and technological change. The second paper examines the social rivalries visible at the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ottoman court between different forms and traditions of knowledge. It explores polemics penned by Sufis about the identity and epistemic authority of astrologers and the responses of the court astrologers. The third paper focuses on "mystical-cosmological" diagrams found in Sufi texts with the goal to contextualize the utility of visual representations of esoteric materials (letters/numbers) as pathways towards a new type of "scientific" knowledge. The final paper moves beyond the Sufi context/literature towards a different genre that of Ottoman proto-ethnology registers, with the goal of exploring their registers' relation to physiognomy and its "occult-scientific" status and their impact on political decision-making processes.
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Dr. Carlos Grenier
Ottoman intellectual culture was open to novel kinds of sciences and lore. In the midst of far-reaching change, Ottomans experimented with knowledge and narratives drawn from imagined pre-Islamic and non-Islamic pasts. This “ancient knowledge” was applied to contemporary situations in order make sense of the rapid political and social transformations of the early modern period. This presentation will explore the varied uses of one such repository of “ancient knowledge”: the narratives relating to King Solomon produced in Ottoman lands in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Several works focusing on the complex figure of Solomon appear between 1450 and 1580, each offering variations on the themes of empire-building, sedentarization, sacral kingship, and technological change.
The first, the anonymous Dürr-i Meknun, written around the time of the conquest of Constantinople, presents an anti-imperial and critical vision, using Solomon and his subsequent disgrace to illustrate the risks of urbanization, imperial centralization and tyranny. The second, the Süleyman-name by the technically-inclined occultist Uzun Firdevsi, portrays Solomon in the image of Sultan Bayezid II, thereby idealizing the latter’s control over the eastern Mediterranean as both magical and technocratic. Finally, the accounts given by Ottoman bureaucrats and architects of the deeds of Sultan Süleyman, notably of the reconstruction of the Temple Mount and the construction of the Süleymaniye complex in Istanbul, show the Solomonic myth realized, consciously enacted by the state itself in full awareness of the myth’s deep multivalence.
Together, these sources trace a trajectory whereby anxieties of early modernity are worked through using the vocabularies of Abrahamic sacred history, showing how Ottoman political history develops in sustained dialogue with this “ancient knowledge”. This presentation will close by suggesting that the use of such narrative models is a crucial component of early modern political thought in the Ottoman Empire and beyond. That is to say, the early modern present was built out of stories of an imagined past.
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Dr. A. Tunç Sen
This paper has two aims. The first is to extract from the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ottoman Sufi lore the views towards astrologers that are more often than not unfavorable in nature. This lore includes the menakibname literature, Sufi treatises engaged in epistemological discussions, and scattered archival correspondences penned by individuals defining themselves as Sufi shaykhs. While the attacks against astrology and astrologers in the medieval and early modern world, in both the Islamicate and European realms, frequently feature as an object of study in the relevant literature, the Sufi take on the practice has been seldom studied. Intriguingly, the most severe objections raised against astrologers in the Ottoman context came from prominent Sufis who vilified astrologers on account of their alleged claims, though they by no means rejected the fundamental celestial principles underlying the practice of astrology. This brings us to the second aim of the paper, which is to highlight the important nuances that need to be addressed when utilizing the polemical literature. If the main object of the contempt and polemics was not the astrological premises but rather the astrologers themselves, what does this tell us about the epistemic and social rivalries at the time? And how did the munajjims themselves define their own craft vis-à-vis those externalist views that tended to reduce them to back-street charlatanry or magicianship promoting the idea of astral determinism?
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Ms. Side Emre
Illustrative diagrams, their functions, and where they fall in the spectrum of graphic representation of cosmological ideas was discussed as a general survey by Ahmet Karamustafa in a chapter titled “Cosmographical Diagrams” in the multi-volume History of Cartography. The scope of his survey on Islamic cosmographical diagrams includes ones that appear in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish texts and in the cultural context of the Islamicate medieval and early modern periods. Karamustafa argued that in Islam there had been a lack of a continuous tradition of cosmological speculation that developed diagrams illustrating major features of a universally accepted Islamic cosmology. While that assessment may be true, early modern Ottoman Sufi poets/authors—in particular, members of the Khalwatiyya and its offshoots—and their literature surprise us with an unexpected phenomenon: elaborate narratives with complex diagrams, letters, numbers, illustrations, and tables with esoteric and mystical content. Tentatively calling them “mystical/visual cosmologies”, in this presentation, I will examine the use and utility of letters, numbers, and diagrams in a number of unpublished Ottoman Turkish manuscripts written by thus far unknown Sufi authors with Khalwati affiliations. I hope to demonstrate that while Ibn al-Arabi’s influence is clear in the realm of “letters”, a consideration of the influence of the representatives of the Ikhwan al-Safa in the Ottoman context is necessary for a better understanding of the use and function of the “numbers” and their complex representations in elaborate diagrams and illustrations that surface in these texts. Most of these texts use Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish interchangeably to depict textual and visual content. My goal is to investigate “mystical and visual cosmologies” in historical and textual context to see if such works can be understood as a type of “new-learning” in the early modern Ottoman world—one that unites Neo-Platonic and Aristotelian “scientific” knowledge, Islamic mysticism, "occult" sciences and Qur’anic teachings.
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Emin Lelic
At its height, the Ottoman state ruled over a dizzying array of linguistic, religious and ethnic groups. In order to effectively rule over all these groups, the Ottomans had to develop some understanding of them. This paper will focus specifically on how the Ottomans understood and catalogued the different ethnic groups, both those well within state boundaries but also those adjacent to state boundaries. It will examine early modern Ottoman proto-ethnology registers, their relation to physiognomy, and the significance of such knowledge in the early modern Ottoman world.
A keen awareness and study of ethno-racial human collectives (ejnas ve ?avayif-i nas) was an integral part of Ottoman socio-political discourse. During the early modern period, this Ottoman proto-ethnology was subsumed under the occult science of physiognomy (ilm-i firaset) as one of its methods (?uruk). At the root of physiognomy is the claim that a predictable correlation between corporeal signs and character traits can be deduced. This same logic was extended beyond individuals to human collectives, such as ethnic groups (jins or ta’ife), to claim that a set of predictable character traits could be discerned on the basis of ethnic background. The claim to predictability lent support to physiognomy’s scientific claim – an experiment that would reproduce the same results – and by extension to its proto-ethnological method.
The systematized study of “ethnic” groups (jins or ta’ife), imbued with the scientific claims of physiognomy, had significant political ramifications within the context of the Ottoman state. The Ottoman notion of justice, which was conceptually rooted in equity (as opposed to equality), was keenly interested in knowing the predictable character traits of its constituent “ethnic” groups. On the basis of that knowledge, the most suitable functions for each group within the imperial configuration could be determined.
In the Ottoman (as well as pre-Ottoman) ethics or akhlaq texts, this proto-ethnology was apportioned to household management. Large households – beginning with the imperial household itself – were major socio-political institutions in the Ottoman world, which were made up of numerous components, not least of which were slaves, servants and clients. On a household basis, it was absolutely crucial to know who would be suited to what function. And physiognomical proto-ethnology provided an apt shorthand for making such decisions.
