"Ottoman Popular Heroic Stories and Their Readers"

Annual of Medieval Studies at CEU, 2008

The Presence of the Prophet in Early Modern and Contemporary Islam, 2021

Around the famous episode of the heavenly ascension of the Prophet, the Ottoman world has developed a proper aesthetic called miʿrāciyye as well in literature as in religious music, miniature and calligraphy. From the early fifteenth century to the 1920s, many poets devoted either a part of a book or an entire work to the miʿrāc, most often in the form of a mes̱nevī or qaṣīde, of varying lengths. Rather than an intertextual comparison that seeks to classify present and absent themes in order to deduce a typology, as the Turkish scholar Metin Akar had undertaken, this article sketches a short history of literary miʿrāciyye attentive to the authors, to the characteristics of their writings, and to the debates aroused by the ascension of the Prophet. From a sample of nine miʿrācnāmes written in Ottoman Turkish by authors as diverse as Aḥmedī, Ḥaqqānī, Mecīdī, Naẓīm Yaḥyā Çelebī, Levḥī Bursalī, ʿÖmer Ḥāfıẓ Fenārī, Diyārbekirlī Saʿīd Paşa, Kerkükī ʿAbdüsettār and Meḥmed Bahāʾeddīn, I will try to periodise in a simple way subtle literary variations while showing the tensions that they betray in the treatment of the Prophetic figure, without reducing the history of the miʿrāciyye to a linear evolution that would go, for example, from preaching to esoteric discourse. On the corporal or spiritual nature of the ascension, on the state of sleep or awakening of the Prophet, on the content of the encounter between God and Muḥammad, our authors diverge. But it is precisely here, in the renewal of old debates that are now reformulated and taken to new narrative horizons, that we must see the sign of an Ottoman intellectual vitality and even boldness.

In 1604, a charismatic Sufi sheikh from Tunis commissioned the translation into Ottoman Turkish of Abdallāh b. Abdallāh al Tarjumān’s polemical text entitled Tuḥfat al-Adīb fī al-radd ʿalā ahl al-ṣalīb (1420), with the intention of presenting it to Ottoman Sultan Ahmed I. Soon after, this text became one of the most widely known and disseminated anti-Christian polemical texts in the Islamic world, and by the late nineteenth century, in Europe as well. The article examines the circumstances of Tuḥfa’s translation from Arabic into Ottoman Turkish, the actors involved, the narrative’s trajectory from Tunis to Istanbul, its reception by the Ottoman reading public, as well as impact on the development of an Ottoman polemical genre of self-narrative of conversion to Islam. Transcription and translation of such an Ottoman narrative, which appears to have been directly influenced by Tuḥfa, is fea- tured in the article’s appendix. By focusing on the trajectory of a single text belonging to the genre of religious polemics, the article bridges the traditionally disconnected academic discussions pertaining to the early modern Iberian, North African and Ottoman history and demonstrates their inherent connectivity in the age of confessional polarization (16th-17th centuries). Key words : Polemics; conversion; narrative; intertextuality; Ottoman Empire; Tunis; Translation.

During the first decades of the 20 th century, Ottoman Turkish periodicals in Istanbul bore witness not only to great socio-political transformations, but also to vehement religious-intellectual discussions. At the end of 1921, one concrete example of the latter was a disputation concerning the birth, death, and miracles of Jesus between three Ottoman intellectuals, Ömer Rıza Doğrul, Mehmet Ali Ayni, and Milaslı İsmail Hakkı, in the newspaper Tevhid-i Efkar. They articulated their overlapping and conflicting arguments by taking into account both Christian missionary understandings and polemics against Islam and a variety of Muslim interpretations of Jesus, past and present, conventional and radical, orthodox and heterodox. While all three grounded the Muslim prophetic narrative about Jesus primarily in the Qurʾān, they disputed about the clarity or ambiguity of the qurʾānic passages about Mary's conception of Jesus, the singularity or multiplicity of meanings embedded in the qurʾānic text regarding Jesus, and rational and figurative explanations at the expense of miraculous and literal ones concerning the qurʾānic Jesus narrative. While the unconventional ideas of Ömer Rıza and M. İsmail Hakkı (for instance the view that Mary conceived Jesus through sexual intercourse) did not become popular, their views disclose the intellectual interactions between Muslim intellectuals across different lands and the role of publications in proliferating them. This Ottoman newspaper disputation on Jesus also reveals the crucial role played by the modern state in regulating and drawing the limits of public religious ideas and debates, which fell under the strong purview of both the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic. Regardless of their impact, these intellectuals' ideas reflect a strongly rationalized approach to the Qurʾān, emphasizing the direct contact between the individual believer/reader and the divine text and a desire to render the latter understandable through human reason, rational capacities, and experience.

Classical Arabic literature comparative studies paper

Medieval Arabic Historiography is concerned with social contexts and narrative structures of pre-modern Islamic historiography written in Arabic in seventh and thirteenth-century Syria and Eygpt. Taking up recent theoretical reflections on historical writing in the European Middle Ages, this extraordinary study combines approaches drawn from social sciences and literary studies, with a particular focus on two well-known texts: Abu Shama’s The Book of the Two Gardens, and Ibn Wasil’s The Dissipater of Anxieties. These texts describe events during the life of the sultans Nur-al-Din and Salah al-Din, who are primarily known in modern times as the champions of the anti-Crusade movement. Hirschler shows that these two authors were active interpreters of their society and has considerable room for manoeuvre in both their social environment and the shaping of their texts. Through the use of a fresh and original theoretical approach to pre-modern Arabic historiography, Hirschler presents a new understanding of these texts which have before been relatively neglected, thus providing a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of historiographical studies. Reviews: (11) Journal of the American Oriental Society 130/4 (2010), Reuven Amitai; (10) MESA Review of Middle East Studies 44/1 (2010), Eric Hanne; (9) British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 37/2 (2010), Bruno De Nicola; (8) Orientalische Literaturzeitung 105/1 (2010), Axel Havemann; (7) Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 160/1 (2010), Albrecht Fuess; (6) The American Historical Review 114/3 (2009), Tarif Khalidi; (5) Bulletin of SOAS 72/2 (2009), Yehoshua Frenkel; (4) Al-Masaq: Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean 20/2 (2008), Amira K. Bennison; (3) Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 82/3 (2007), Fred M. Donner; (2) The Muslim World Book Review 28/1 (2007), Fozia Bora; (1) Sehepunkte 7 (2007), Kurt Franz.

Beyond Authenticity, Alternative Approaches to Hadith Narrations and Collections (ed. by Mohammad Gharaibeh), 2023

This article investigates premodern Ottoman devotional uses of hadith in faḍāʾil works. The focus of the analysis is on the faḍāʾil treatise of the Ottoman Bosnian author Ḥasan Imām-zāde al-Būsnawī titled Dalīl al-sāʾirīn ilā ziyārat Ḥabīb rabb al-ʿālamīn (A Guidebook to the Visitors of the Beloved of the Lord of the Worlds).1 After an overview of the genre and its Ottoman fate, I discuss the employment of hadith in Imām-zāde al-Būsnawī's work and how the arguments in favor of the Prophet focus on emotional, intercessional, and spatial aspects, with the ultimate aim of promoting the ziyāra and residing (mujāwara) in Medina. This sheds light on dimensions of Prophet-oriented devotional life in the early modern Ottoman period which heavily relied on an array of hadith literature and pre-Ottoman intellectual production.

Acaib: Occasional papers on the Ottoman perceptions of the supernatural, 2021

Where can we find today those copies that we know once accompanied a specific individual or group on a journey in early modern times? What manuscript notes or other miscellaneous textual fragments might we find in these volumes? Could these notes allow us to capture, in their own contemporaneity, the personal reflections and emotional states of individuals on particular journeys or in struggles for survival? What could such details tell us about their relationship to writing, to the natural world around them, to time, or to the supernatural? And how have these manuscripts in motion, some of which eventually found their way into the hands of non-Ottomans, contribute to the accumulation of Islamic manuscripts in early modern European collections? This article sets out to address these questions by spotlighting the contents of a curious manuscript of clear Ottoman provenance currently housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) in Paris. The book includes several separate short tracts and textual fragments, mostly dealing with calendric computation and different divination techniques, penned down by manifestly different hands, some not fully literate in Arabic script. The nature of texts found in the manuscript and some of the curious notes on certain folios of the book (left by an Ottoman sailor taking part in military ventures and directly addressing his fellow seafarers on board) offer a unique window into capturing, with striking immediacy, the sentiments of a particular Ottoman individual and his respective community in motion that had resort to supernatural forces and other tools of divination in their fight for survival under dire circumstances.