Sixteenth-century writings from across the Ottoman Empire teem with accounts of social gatherings known as majalis (s. majlis). Though the term could refer to gatherings quite different in nature and in purpose, majalis usually featured some mix of scholars, poets and grandees; often involved a component of intellectual or poetic sparring; and were always governed by intricate rules of social conduct. The frequency of such accounts across literary genres suggests that the politics of who visited whom, sat where, and said what was not to be taken lightly in the early modern Ottoman Empire. In my paper, I will examine the ways in which the majalis of sixteenth-century Damascus were mediated by a range of written texts. Scholars of the era wrote countless descriptions of Damascene social gatherings, often in stunning detail: many devoted considerable space to recording what we might call attendance lists, seating arrangements and transcripts of majalis as they unfolded in very particular, carefully described spaces: gardens, courtyards, shrines. Yet many of these accounts had a clearly prescriptive intent, as well: whether by drawing upon their own experiences or upon those of their Muslim forebears, many writers sought to instruct their contemporaries on the proper rules of etiquette within these spaces. By examining the production and circulation of Damascene writings on majalis, I will show the importance of this social institution for establishing hierarchies and negotiating difference within the urban environment. Yet in the context of the newly expanded empire of the sixteenth century, the significance of this project hardly remained local, as scholars used the gatherings and the genres they spawned to project their own vision of what it meant to be an upright, learned Muslim man in the very diverse Ottoman lands.

Evliya Çelebi’s Book of Travels represents the most comprehensive description of the Ottoman realm in the seventeenth century. And recent scholarly attention has shifted away from his reports on the core regions of the Balkans and Anatolia toward his accounts of the more distant Arab provinces and beyond. Despite that shift, little attention has been paid to Damascus, a city that Evliya Çelebi regarded as one of the six greatest in the Ottoman realm and a proverbial paradise. The paper focuses on his account of Damascus, a city he visited twice. It first situates the account in the context of his empirical and imperial mapping of the Ottoman realm and then considers the particular narrative trajectory, since his two visits were taken under different circumstances and separated by some twenty-five years. Damascus, as will be argued, is ultimately rendered by Evliya Çelebi as a site for affirming personal piety as well as Ottoman authority.

If the anti-crusading (and Sunnifying) hero, Nur al-Din Zengi (d.1174), re-built Damascus, it was the scholar, Ibn Asakir (d.1175), who “made the city” in his voluminous History of Damascus. By giving the city its first topography and proffering the biographies of anyone of note who lived in or passed through the city, Ibn Asakir not only enshrined the city in text, but also literally populated it. Expectedly, this history quickly became the canonical text about Damascus, to which every later narrator of the city was almost uncomfortably bound. The proposed paper attempts to locate and identify an uninterrupted tradition of topographies of Damascus dating back to Ibn Asakir’s 12-century foundational text and ending with the 18th-century topography of the Levant by Ibn Kannan al-Salihi (d.1741). It also aims to show how later authors, while acknowledging their debt to Ibn `Asakir, had to struggle with his overwhelming authority. How did Ibn `Asakir’s city of God and the Great Mosque become Ibn Kannan’s verdant city of pleasure parks? In addition to changes in the cityscape over the centuries, it is the gradual liberation of Ibn `Asakir’s children from his yoke that allowed these narrators of city a measure of individual authorship and civic ownership.

For the majority of people in the early modern Ottoman Empire, pilgrimage was one of the few acts that spurred them to undertake arduous journeys. The city of Damascus often served as these pilgrims' embarkation point from which they set out to not only complete the Hajj in Mecca and Medina but also to visit the graves of the saints and prophets. While the original pilgrimage itineraries and their literary representations were established in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, a new group of travelers revisited this pilgrimage in the late seventeenth century. Their purpose was to re-witness one of the foundational elements in Islam—the reality of the prophets, saints, and ancients (the salaf)—and to understand how the graves of these men and women became attached to certain locations. This paper examines how pilgrimage inscribed meaning onto Damascus and its environs. It utilizes the travelogues of late seventeenth-century Ottoman intellectuals, in particular, Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi and Nabi, along with other material such as sermon collections, restoration orders, and more to understand how pilgrims, their patrons, and their enemies crafted the image of Damascus. The paper adumbrates how in the seventeenth century the two types of pilgrimages—to the Haramayn and to the saintly shrines—became increasingly unified as the importance of prophetic shrines grew. In the process, novel notions of witnessing and visualizing emerged to attach renewed sanctity and meaning to the city through its graves and holy men. More broadly, the paper aims to increase our understanding of pilgrimage and travel in both the Ottoman and larger world and shed light on the challenges that a traditional Islam defined by saints and holy men faced in the seventeenth century.