Hundreds of geographical books and illustrations have been produced in Arabic and Ottoman-Turkish since the late 18th-century. With the proclamations of the Nizam-? Cedid and the Tanzimat, maps and documents titled “geography” (co?rafya), atlas (atlas), and later almanac (salname) proliferated with great speed amidst the emergence of the territorialized nation-state, intensifying militarization, and sweep capitalization of Middle Eastern economies. This body of spatial knowledge comprises both geography, information concerning life on earth usually portrayed as points, lines, and polygons, and cosmography, theories about the earth’s position in the universe represented as circles. Cosmography depicted phenomena through spheres from the celestial moving down to the planetary, the continental, the regional, and the urban. The aim of this presentation is to breathe life into the myriad of geographical works and objects produced in the modern period, outlining their historical value for understanding the challenges that the region confronted in the wake of military defeats, bankruptcy, and the proclamation of Ottoman reforms, and using it to identify the distinctive features of late imperial and post-Ottoman institutional, intellectual, and economic currents. From being rare and large artifacts accessible only within court circles and engineering schools, maps, atlases, and geographical books became more portable and popular as a form of representation and argumentation in military and infrastructure planning, financial policy, research, public education and advertising.This presentation examines how representations and metaphors of circles transformed throughout the proliferation of geographical language and tools in the 19th and the 20th-centuries. It brings together a new range of primary sources, from atlases and censorship decrees, scholarly works, and provincial almanacs, to financial, bureaucratic, and military records, to offer new insights on the transformation of cosmography and circular thinking throughout imperial reforms, capitalization, and militarization.

The functionality of illustrative diagrams and their scholarly importance in representing cosmological ideas has been discussed in the context of Islamic(ate) cosmographical diagrams by Ahmet Karamustafa in the multi-volume History of Cartography. 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 this assessment holds 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: narratives with complex circular diagrams, letters, and numbers with esoteric content. Tentatively calling them “mystical cosmologies”, in this presentation I will focus on the uses and functions of “the circle” surfacing as the geometric form of choice to communicate philosophical, scientific, mystical, Qur’anic/Prophetic, and esoteric content in 16th century Ottoman Sufi manuscripts. My preliminary research indicates that Ottoman Sufis drew diagrams to depict a knowledge that combined “science”, as in the scientific study of letters and numerology, with that of Islamic mysticism (tasawwuf), as in the study of the Divine and “the sacred”. Relying only in part on Ibn al-Arabi’s influence, this eclectic methodology aimed to reach a harmonious understanding of the mechanics of the Universe—one that combined the sacred and the scientific strands of knowledge-to grasp God’s Universe and mankind’s role in the cosmos. These Sufi authors prioritized drawing circular diagrams to prove their points: a novel and unstudied phenomenon, which we do not see in the mainstream Islamic religious literature of the period produced in the Ottoman domains. As an Ottoman historian and Sufism scholar, I am approaching this previously unknown phenomenon as a “new type of knowledge in the Ottoman World”. What advances toward a “universal learning” did these authors assert through the use of these innovative visual elements? Why did they draw circles to depict their visions and experiences? Investigating the mystical and visual cosmologies and their textual contexts, I hope to explore new formations of knowledge in the early modern Ottoman world, one which harmonized Neo-Platonic and Aristotelian “scientific” knowledge with Islamic mysticism, and Qur’anic teachings prioritizing the geometric form of the “circle” at its core.

Medieval world maps, Islamic as well as European, illustrated the world as a circle. Coming to signify orbis terrarum (“the circle of lands,”) this circle was divided into the known continents, regions, or climate zones. In the early Ottoman atlases, as was in their European counterparts, a double-sphered depiction of the world gradually replaced the single circle. The typus orbis terrarum, or the küre-i arz, does not simply epitomize the venture to represent the three dimensional earth on a two-dimensional page, or reveal the new world: it illuminates changing approaches to geographical knowledge in the early modern Ottoman Empire. Atlas, as a genre, entered the Ottoman intellectual world in the seventeenth century with an adaptation-translation of Atlas Minor into Ottoman by Katip Çelebi, called Levamiu'n-Nur fi Tercümeti Atlas Minor. It was followed by Behram ed-Dime?ki’s Ottoman adaptation of Atlas Maior, Muhtasar-u Nusret'l-Islami ve's-surur fi tercumeti Atlas Mayor, and Müteferrika’s publication of the first Ottoman atlas based on these manuscripts, constituting the first atlases in the Ottoman Empire. In his Levamiu'n-Nur fi Tercümeti Atlas Minor, Katip Çelebi explained that he pictured the whole earth in two circles (“co?rafiyay? iki dâyirede tasvîr”) for it was vital to study “the whole” in sciences. Representing the whole world in two circles was indeed exactly what typus orbis terrarum meant: it was an embodiment of the earth in its entirety. Katip Çelebi further elaborated in the same section that he presented the description of all the features and pictures of the land/earth in his geography, emphasizing the rising association of a holistic representation of the world with geography itself. This paper aims to demonstrate the transformation in Ottoman intellectual thinking as ways of describing and representing the world changed with the atlas. Atlas was synonomous with geography in the Ottoman intellectual world before it came to be defined as a collection of maps. Straddling between knowledge and science as an Ottoman ‘ilm, geography was defined repeatedly from the seventeenth to nineteenth century in these atlases. Organized around continents and centered on the earth, the early Ottoman atlases opened with descriptions and representations of küre-i arz. The modifications and changes —as well as continuities— embodied through these “circles of land” in the early atlases open up a window to the process of the transformation of geographical knowledge in the early modern Ottoman Empire.

In the Aristotelian cosmos, circles and spheres represented the most perfect geometrical shape in nature. All of the celestial bodies situated beyond the Earth and its orbit were understood to be made of an exalted, ethereal substance which could only move in perfect, crystalline spheres. In the third century CE, Ptolemaic cosmology devised epicycles—circles within circles—to reconcile the Aristotelian requirement of perfect spheres with the observed reality that stars and planets do not actually move this way. Since the time of Ptolemy, Islamic astronomers have grappled with Ptolemy's epicycles, improved on his models, and offered their own alternatives—such as doing away with epicycles entirely and drawing on yet another form of circular motion, the Tusi couple. In this paper I trace the history of some of the attempts made by Islamic astronomers to reconcile the notion of a circular cosmos with the reality of natural observations. This paper culminates in 17th century Ottoman accounts of astronomy, the role of geo- or heliocentrism, and the rejection and adoption of certain alternative circular cosmologies. This study also reveals how increased exposure to European astronomical developments only partially impacted Ottoman and Islamic views of the circular cosmos, who posited their own versions of circular cosmology intertwined with beliefs about the role of planetary conjunctions, astrological prognostication, and mastery over time itself.

Using the circle as an analytical category permits a reading of premodern Islamic cosmological treatises that gives primacy to the visual and spatial over the textual, allowing us a sideways approach to ‘reading’ a work, not for its text or its narrative illustrations, but for its schematic diagrammes of the cosmos. The concentric circles from which the visual diagramme of the cosmos is constructed gives the viewer insight into the conceptualisation of the world and our place in it, not only reflecting the visual culture of terrestrial and celestial spatiality but also bringing into focus the materiality and production of the manuscripts themselves – how were the diagrammes constructed, with what tools, and what aesthetic preferences do they evince? As the conceptual construction of the cosmos in illustrated versions of al-Qazwini ?Aj??ib al-makhl?q?t wa-ghar??ib al-mawj?d?t relies heavily on the circle, this paper will examine the reception and circulation of the early modern ?Aj??ib al-makhl?q?t manuscript tradition through the Persianate world, focusing on the patronage and adaptation of cosmological diagrammes in illustrated manuscripts from 16th-19th century in Iran and South Asia and their later adaptation and circulation in lithographs printed from the mid-19th century. The continuity of visual style and conceptualisation of the cosmos in these mass-produced and widely circulated lithographs adapted from the larger ?Aj??ib al-makhl?q?t tradition brings into question the link between the introduction of printing technologies and the rupture that colonial modernity caused to Islamic knowledge production. Not only does the adaption of the schema of the premodern cosmos into lithographs challenge the disenchantment of modernity brought about by the spread of literacy and print and the ascendency of Islamic reformism in the 19th-century, but it also raises the question of how images circulated, and how this concentric vision of the cosmos was received by audiences as the volume of lithograph copies multiplied and became available throughout the Middle East and South Asia. The presence of these mass-produced not-quite-manuscripts raises a number of questions that will be addressed in the conclusion to this paper, namely, how and why did this premodern visual culture of the cosmos continue to circulate so widely in an era of reformism and modernity? How was it read and interpreted, and how does the continued circulation of these diagrammes (and the accompanying weltanschauung in which they are situated) bring into question the notion of a rupture with a premodern and precolonial past?