Cemil Aydin, George Mason University, Principal Investigator of the Project and Director, Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies

Peter Stearns, Provost, George Mason University

Robert Vaughan, President, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities

Jim Leach, Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanties

Cemil Aydin, George Mason University, Principal Investigator of the Project and Director, Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies

Peter Stearns, Provost, George Mason University

Robert Vaughan, President, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities

Jim Leach, Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanties

Gulru Necipoglu, Harvard University

Massumeh Farhad, Smithsonian Freer and Sackler Galleries

Gulru Necipoglu, Presentation Summary

The panel first addressed the problem of scholarship on post-medieval Islamic art, a term which is itself problematic and over-simplified. Prof. Necipoglu described the 19th century classification of Islamic art as a genealogical-artistic offshoot of the late-antique shared European heritage, which, after fusing Byzantine and Iranian-Sassanian elements, became transformed into an exotic tradition characterized by its decorative qualities and lack of figurative representation. This Eurocentric, Orientalist perspective essentialized Islamic art within the binary of an East/West civilizational divide. Other aspects of the prevailing paradigm include reading the visual arts of Muslim societies in ethnic and national categories (Moorish, Arab, Persian, Turkish, Indian, etc.), with its compartmentalization and lack of attention to trans-regional connections and influences among Muslim societies and between Muslim societies and others, from the Far East to Europe. The artistic and architectural production of Muslim societies in the period after 1300 CE, and especially that of the 16th through 19th centuries has been viewed through the lens of decline following the golden age of Islamic art of the medieval period, obscuring its particular characteristics, cultural and social context. Another problem is the presumed unity or universal quality of Islamic art in the golden age, interrupted by the Mongol period, after which regional styles were said to have predominated; these Orientalist essentializations even appear in recently developed museums that emphasize Islamic art as a cultural bridge, but fail to build one. A problem at the foreground of the period from 1300 to 1900 is the tendency to halt studies of Islamic art at 1800 CE, as though there were no continuity or progression of the tradition into the modern period.

Professor Necipoglu positioned her own scholarship on Islamic and Ottoman art and architecture as postitioned between the Eastern and Western horizons, with a glance toward the Mediterranean. Her efforts to show comparisons and relationships both toward east and west, and to bring to light trans-regional unities and trans-cultural exchanges with neighboring lands and to show the depth of these interactions among Muslim and non-Muslim subcultures as reflected in art and architecture. Her work contributes to the reconstruction of the very field of Islamic art and architecture in training the next generation of students, in new scholarly research, and in displaying and contextualizing Islamic art for the public. Overcoming its 19th century foundations, its isolation from European and other traditions in surveys and museums of world art, and its relegation to a past without any bridge or contribution to modernity. As a way forward, Prof. Necipoglu proposed insisting on rigorous periodization of Islamic art in order to delineate its historicity and cultural context in relation to world-historical trends, but also to provide a framework in which trans-regional and intercultural connections can be appreciated, and in which scholarship on Islamic art and architecture focus on continuity and change from its inception into the modern period.

Among the specific findings of her research that illuminate the period of early modernity covered in the Forum are her discussion of the autobiography of architect Sinan as a figure representative of modern individualistic ambition, the emergence of the tradition of portraiture employing both eastern and western influences, and the context of Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal architecture as part of a global discourse embedded in the expansion of urban spaces and the emergence of new social and cultural institutions, and its expression of imperial presence. Highlights of Dr. Necipoglu’s work and/or access to articles can be found in the bibliography at http://www.muslimmodernities.org/items/show/21 and in the Forum Reader.

Massumeh Farhad, Presentation Summary

Dr. Farhad’s presentation focused on several objects from the three empires as a way of discussing the choices made by scholars interfacing with the public. She emphasized the difficulties of presenting beautiful and sumptuous objects of art to the public in such a way that they gain insight into the historical setting that gave rise to them, but also to foster appreciation of their beauty and interest. The challenge of overcoming widely held essentialized views of what Islamic art is or is not are a major responsibility for museum curators. Like Dr. Necipoglu, Dr. Farhad argues that historicizing the objects, treating them in scholarly and public display contexts like the documents they are, is the key to creating meaning for these audiences. Addressing the problem of the decline paradigm, she highlighted the problem that the 17th and 18th centuries were previously considered to represent the decline of Persian painting because they seemed to look toward Europe. While this dismissive assessment has been overcome, she discussed the need for much more work, particularly in the area of assessing cross-cultural comparison and influence. Rather than simply seeing in a painting generic European influence and hence the decline of an indigenous tradition, she used the painting to illustrate how it represents a classical Persian theme that shows western influence. This influence, however, was not merely imitative but selective, just as earlier influences on Persian painting were selective, and that these artistic features tell us about that particular moment in Safavid history. This kind of contextualization avoids the essentialist, ahistorical approach that has characterized perceptions of the period.

Dr. Farhad surveyed the origins of private and museum collecting in 19th century Europe, noting that for Charles Lang Freer to actually go to Asia to study Asian art rather than going to dealers in London or Paris was pioneering at the time. The collections were often assembled for purely aesthetic reasons, which led to assembling a hodge-podge of poorly classified and dated objects that have required much curatorial work and scholarship by modern museum staffs. Together with the paradigms of early scholarship on Islamic art in the West discussed above, these issues have meant formidable challenges in contextualizing and displaying the works for the public. More recently, there has been a rush of collecting contemporary art in Muslim societies, while there are still major gaps in the period from 1800 to the 1970s. While established European and American museums have re-thought and re-installed their Islamic collections, new museums in Doha, Kuwait and elsewhere represent rich new collections and purposes of celebrating Islamic arts that present new challenges to connecting publics and scholarship. Among the problems Dr. Farhad highlighted were the isolation of objects in displays, taking utilitarian objects out of context, and not helping audiences to relate these objects either to each other or to the historical context in which they are embedded. She mentioned the limitations of museum space that require curators to show centuries and a wide geographic range of objects in a few rooms, requiring utmost thought in order to invest the objects with meaning. Clustering related objects is one way to achieve this, letting the objects speak through translation of related texts or inscriptions, and taking care to spread curatorial knowledge across a wide range of objects, from coins to clothing to ceramics and so on, and to educate the heterogeneous museum audience about this vast space and time. A further challenge that has heightened during the past decade is the tendency for audiences to want historical, artistic objects to lend meaning to events of the present day, especially in the over-wrought atmosphere surrounding public perceptions of Islam and Muslims today. Conversely, people tend to want the objects to fulfill pre-determined ideas that viewers hold about Islam and Muslim culture, requiring curators to assist viewers in seeing the objects for what they are, as evidence of historically and geographically located artifacts.

Dr. Farhad emphasized the fact that the museum world is frozen in space with its objects, but to display them in such a way that audiences aware that there is no single interpretation, that there are shifts back and forth in time and space. What stands for a moment in history—say in the 15th century—isnt the same in the 17th c because the networks have shifted, the connections are different in the region and the world. In the context of the museum this is the most important thing to get across, that these objects are not frozen in time, and we can make them more dynamic by historicizing them, placing them in the context in which they exist as a part of their culture, time and place. She called upon scholars to study objects and architecture from cross-disciplinary perspectives, to place the works from the period of the three empires in the context of connections among Muslim societies of the period and beyond them. Historians need to enhance their collaboration with curators in order to achieve the necessary paradigm shifts and use this scholarship to enhance understanding of the arts as a matter of public knowledge. Among the points of discussion among other participants at the Forum were the limitations inherent in placing the three empires at the center of the period, the need to conceptualize and include the arts of lands on the periphery of the central territories of the three empires, such as southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, southern Arabia and even Central Asia and China in this period. In response, the panelists noted the importance of historical context and periodization as ways of avoiding the “unity in diversity” model and attributing agency and choice to the makers of objects and monuments, as well as bringing to bear scholarship on the connections in the region and in the world as a whole at different periods.

Gulru Necipoglu, Harvard University

Massumeh Farhad, Smithsonian Freer and Sackler Galleries

Gulru Necipoglu, Presentation Summary

The panel first addressed the problem of scholarship on post-medieval Islamic art, a term which is itself problematic and over-simplified. Prof. Necipoglu described the 19th century classification of Islamic art as a genealogical-artistic offshoot of the late-antique shared European heritage, which, after fusing Byzantine and Iranian-Sassanian elements, became transformed into an exotic tradition characterized by its decorative qualities and lack of figurative representation. This Eurocentric, Orientalist perspective essentialized Islamic art within the binary of an East/West civilizational divide. Other aspects of the prevailing paradigm include reading the visual arts of Muslim societies in ethnic and national categories (Moorish, Arab, Persian, Turkish, Indian, etc.), with its compartmentalization and lack of attention to trans-regional connections and influences among Muslim societies and between Muslim societies and others, from the Far East to Europe. The artistic and architectural production of Muslim societies in the period after 1300 CE, and especially that of the 16th through 19th centuries has been viewed through the lens of decline following the golden age of Islamic art of the medieval period, obscuring its particular characteristics, cultural and social context. Another problem is the presumed unity or universal quality of Islamic art in the golden age, interrupted by the Mongol period, after which regional styles were said to have predominated; these Orientalist essentializations even appear in recently developed museums that emphasize Islamic art as a cultural bridge, but fail to build one. A problem at the foreground of the period from 1300 to 1900 is the tendency to halt studies of Islamic art at 1800 CE, as though there were no continuity or progression of the tradition into the modern period.

Professor Necipoglu positioned her own scholarship on Islamic and Ottoman art and architecture as postitioned between the Eastern and Western horizons, with a glance toward the Mediterranean. Her efforts to show comparisons and relationships both toward east and west, and to bring to light trans-regional unities and trans-cultural exchanges with neighboring lands and to show the depth of these interactions among Muslim and non-Muslim subcultures as reflected in art and architecture. Her work contributes to the reconstruction of the very field of Islamic art and architecture in training the next generation of students, in new scholarly research, and in displaying and contextualizing Islamic art for the public. Overcoming its 19th century foundations, its isolation from European and other traditions in surveys and museums of world art, and its relegation to a past without any bridge or contribution to modernity. As a way forward, Prof. Necipoglu proposed insisting on rigorous periodization of Islamic art in order to delineate its historicity and cultural context in relation to world-historical trends, but also to provide a framework in which trans-regional and intercultural connections can be appreciated, and in which scholarship on Islamic art and architecture focus on continuity and change from its inception into the modern period.

Among the specific findings of her research that illuminate the period of early modernity covered in the Forum are her discussion of the autobiography of architect Sinan as a figure representative of modern individualistic ambition, the emergence of the tradition of portraiture employing both eastern and western influences, and the context of Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal architecture as part of a global discourse embedded in the expansion of urban spaces and the emergence of new social and cultural institutions, and its expression of imperial presence. Highlights of Dr. Necipoglu’s work and/or access to articles can be found in the bibliography at http://www.muslimmodernities.org/items/show/21 and in the Forum Reader.

Massumeh Farhad, Presentation Summary

Dr. Farhad’s presentation focused on several objects from the three empires as a way of discussing the choices made by scholars interfacing with the public. She emphasized the difficulties of presenting beautiful and sumptuous objects of art to the public in such a way that they gain insight into the historical setting that gave rise to them, but also to foster appreciation of their beauty and interest. The challenge of overcoming widely held essentialized views of what Islamic art is or is not are a major responsibility for museum curators. Like Dr. Necipoglu, Dr. Farhad argues that historicizing the objects, treating them in scholarly and public display contexts like the documents they are, is the key to creating meaning for these audiences. Addressing the problem of the decline paradigm, she highlighted the problem that the 17th and 18th centuries were previously considered to represent the decline of Persian painting because they seemed to look toward Europe. While this dismissive assessment has been overcome, she discussed the need for much more work, particularly in the area of assessing cross-cultural comparison and influence. Rather than simply seeing in a painting generic European influence and hence the decline of an indigenous tradition, she used the painting to illustrate how it represents a classical Persian theme that shows western influence. This influence, however, was not merely imitative but selective, just as earlier influences on Persian painting were selective, and that these artistic features tell us about that particular moment in Safavid history. This kind of contextualization avoids the essentialist, ahistorical approach that has characterized perceptions of the period.

Dr. Farhad surveyed the origins of private and museum collecting in 19th century Europe, noting that for Charles Lang Freer to actually go to Asia to study Asian art rather than going to dealers in London or Paris was pioneering at the time. The collections were often assembled for purely aesthetic reasons, which led to assembling a hodge-podge of poorly classified and dated objects that have required much curatorial work and scholarship by modern museum staffs. Together with the paradigms of early scholarship on Islamic art in the West discussed above, these issues have meant formidable challenges in contextualizing and displaying the works for the public. More recently, there has been a rush of collecting contemporary art in Muslim societies, while there are still major gaps in the period from 1800 to the 1970s. While established European and American museums have re-thought and re-installed their Islamic collections, new museums in Doha, Kuwait and elsewhere represent rich new collections and purposes of celebrating Islamic arts that present new challenges to connecting publics and scholarship. Among the problems Dr. Farhad highlighted were the isolation of objects in displays, taking utilitarian objects out of context, and not helping audiences to relate these objects either to each other or to the historical context in which they are embedded. She mentioned the limitations of museum space that require curators to show centuries and a wide geographic range of objects in a few rooms, requiring utmost thought in order to invest the objects with meaning. Clustering related objects is one way to achieve this, letting the objects speak through translation of related texts or inscriptions, and taking care to spread curatorial knowledge across a wide range of objects, from coins to clothing to ceramics and so on, and to educate the heterogeneous museum audience about this vast space and time. A further challenge that has heightened during the past decade is the tendency for audiences to want historical, artistic objects to lend meaning to events of the present day, especially in the over-wrought atmosphere surrounding public perceptions of Islam and Muslims today. Conversely, people tend to want the objects to fulfill pre-determined ideas that viewers hold about Islam and Muslim culture, requiring curators to assist viewers in seeing the objects for what they are, as evidence of historically and geographically located artifacts.

Dr. Farhad emphasized the fact that the museum world is frozen in space with its objects, but to display them in such a way that audiences aware that there is no single interpretation, that there are shifts back and forth in time and space. What stands for a moment in history—say in the 15th century—isnt the same in the 17th c because the networks have shifted, the connections are different in the region and the world. In the context of the museum this is the most important thing to get across, that these objects are not frozen in time, and we can make them more dynamic by historicizing them, placing them in the context in which they exist as a part of their culture, time and place. She called upon scholars to study objects and architecture from cross-disciplinary perspectives, to place the works from the period of the three empires in the context of connections among Muslim societies of the period and beyond them. Historians need to enhance their collaboration with curators in order to achieve the necessary paradigm shifts and use this scholarship to enhance understanding of the arts as a matter of public knowledge. Among the points of discussion among other participants at the Forum were the limitations inherent in placing the three empires at the center of the period, the need to conceptualize and include the arts of lands on the periphery of the central territories of the three empires, such as southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, southern Arabia and even Central Asia and China in this period. In response, the panelists noted the importance of historical context and periodization as ways of avoiding the “unity in diversity” model and attributing agency and choice to the makers of objects and monuments, as well as bringing to bear scholarship on the connections in the region and in the world as a whole at different periods.

Cemal Kafadar, Harvard University

Rajeev Kinra, Northwestern University

Kathryn Babayan, University of Michigan

Cemal Kafadar Presentation Summary

Prof. Kafadar took note of the many paradigm shifts of recent decades of which the historiography of our region is only one. He took note of various factors in international relations such as the post-colonial transformation, the post-Soviet era, and intellectual trends such as post-structuralism within which these paradigm shifts are taking place. Noting the phenomenon of neo-Ottomanism which as taken hold in Turkish studies and even tourism and popular culture, a resurgence and reclaiming of history following a period of downplaying historical studies. I will underline the following interrelated developments. Prof. Kafadar mentioned four areas related to the paradigm shift.

In confronting both the rise and decline narratives, in the past 2-3 decades Ottoman studies scholars have been seeking an alternative narrative framework to the pervasive declinism in analysis of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. It is so deeply embedded in the historiography that we can barely escape it, since it forms the dominant mode of thinking about later Ottoman history. We cannot just give up on the task of confronting it. Simplistic as it seems, decline is a highly effective conceptual tool that enables its users to weave together processes in the political, social, and economic spheres together with a set of descriptive terms related to decline, debauchery, and degeneration.

The terminology question of early modernity is another issue within the larger narrative of world history. Should we designate this post-medieval period as early modernity, or as a post-medieval society that needs to be reckoned with on its own terms? The question of early modernity has been reduced to a matter of political correctness like use of the word decline, but the true task of intellectual significance is to develop an understanding of connectedness and interactivity of various spheres of life: politics, everyday practices, etc. If the term “modern” is to be a meaningful concept one has to deal with the inter-connnectedness of multiple spheres to endow it with meaning, or play with other notions with similar function. I have been trying to understand Ottoman early modernity by looking at the connections between various spheres.

There has been the realization in the field that we cannot continue to do Ottoman history without relating it to trans-regional, transnational frameworks. Prof. Kafadar spoke about the “trans-temporal” dimension of Ottoman history, or viewing the three empires within larger temporal frameworks as our world history colleagues do. Prof. Kafadar called this combined shift of frameworks “the de-Turkification,” or de-centering of the narrative that has privileged the linear story of the Turks from Central Asia to Manzikert. That kind of narrative has configured and constrained the historical imagination in Ottoman studies. Diachronically speaking as well, the embeddedness of Ottoman history—the people, institutions, dynamics, practices—in the medieval, Byzantine past is not sufficiently developed. This same set of issues is also relevant to dealing with the Mughals and Safavids and other Muslim societies. We cannot continue to do Ottoman history without considering contemporaneous societies. The development of connected histories takes into account the larger space that the three empires inhabited, from the Danube to Southeast Asia, and everything around them. The trans-regional turn helps us imagine a space filled with consumer goods and other sorts of linkages [in the early modern period and before], and helps us to back away from merely comparative history in favor of something more meaningful and substantive. Ottoman historians still suffer from something of a stiff neck, with their gaze directed mostly toward Europe, while looking in other directions still requires much more effort. Prof. Kafadar mentioned in this connection his own research on the history of coffeehouses, and the colonization of the nighttime in terms of its broader social and political implications, and common aspects of coffeehouses as part of global consumption patterns and their effects in the political and social spheres. Coffee is only one of the commodities that has a global story that informs the development of the modern world.

Prof. Kafadar further addressed de-centering the ethnicizing narrative, or de-Turkification of Ottoman history. He stressed that Byzantine and Ottoman history are intertwined, and are not “owned” by either Turks or Greeks, but should be pursued within the humanities to bring together the legacies in which each group participated. In addition, setting Ottoman history into a trans-regional frame would include non-Turkish peoples of the former Ottoman world, an effort that is beginning to take place, putting aside self-definition, stories of victimization, and triumphalist narratives alike. The historiography of the Safavid and Mughal empires would also benefit from a similar effort related to getting away from essentialization of ethnic, linguistic identities, especially the Turkish and Iranian.

Rajeev Kinra Presentation Summary

Building upon the drawing of the shaikh with the wine cup in Dr. Farhad’s presentation, Prof. Kinra cited a verse from an eighteenth century Urdu poet that humorously referred to the destruction of the Kaaba, saying it is not the citadel of the heart [of a believer]. Such humor seems incongruous because it doesn’t fit the pervasive narrative of decline in Mughal historiography. According to that narrative, British conquest of the Mughal empire was the only event of importance during that period. Kinra asserted that the decline paradigm is particularly stubborn in Mughal historiography because it is a sub-narrative in the overall narrative of Islamic decline. He described the trajectory of the Mughal history narrative as a parabola, which begins its ascent with Babar arriving in 1526, founding the empire and remaining only four years, followed by Humayun for another brief period, and culminating in the ascension of Akbar, his son, as head of the Mughal empire. Akbar, contemporary of Queen Elizabeth I, reigned from 1556 to1605. He is said to have expanded and consolidated the empire, and ruled as an outward looking, religiously tolerant leader. The lionization of Akbar represents the height of the parabola, which descends with the reign of Jahangir, followed by Shah Jahan, whom everyone knows as the builder of monuments (Taj Mahal, Red Fort, Jama Masjid). The historiography has projected backward its judgment of Aurangzeb as an intolerant champion of orthodoxy and the figure of decline, so that Shah Jahan is seen as having been even a precursor of the later ruler’s orthodoxy in contrast to Akbar. With Aurangzeb the parabola drops sharply, and religious strife, invasion, financial overextension combine to open the door to British takeover. This pre-existing narrative ignores the historical evidence that would contradict it. Because it is wrapped between the decline narrative and the modernization narrative of the British period, it has been very durable.

Dr. Kinra related how his work on Mughal history challenges that entrenched narrative. The first is a problem is one of selection in historical research. After independence 1947, historians were interested in social history, economic history, the history of institutions and the history of war. Mughal economic policy was viewed as important, and institutions were more important than the people who in habited them. Kinra’s own work seeks out individuals who depart from this narrative, such as a Punjabi Brahman official at the Mughal court who rose through imperial secretarial ranks to become Chief Secretary under Shah Jahan. This already disturbs the standard narrative. Kinra’s Brahman official also wrote in Persian on topics like Sufism, Persian poetry, and wrote prose chronicles of shah Jahan’s court, and was the author of many letters, which allow insights into his biography. Such individuals have been little studied because they do not fit the paradigm. Nor does it fit into the decline narrative or the concept of impending orthodoxy, since he continued to work as a court secretary until 1660, well into Aurangzeb’s reign. His writings provide insights into the social history of the institutions. Other, similar material from the Mughal era has been little studied by historians, and later literature has also been either neglected or its use has not been showcased.

The second problem is that the entire period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century is not studied at all in Persian literary history, simply because it has been pre-judged as a literature of decline—a situation described in Persian painting by Dr. Farhad—based on a set of ideals as to what it should have been rather than assessing what it was on its own terms. The fact that Indian writers of Persian poetry are considered as lesser lights than indigenous Persian writers has created an embargo on Indian poets, as well as some Iranian, Turkish and Central Asian poets of the time, because they differ from the norm set by earlier scholars of an Ideal Persian poetry. Kinra argues, in contrast, for a period in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of experimentation in modern literary styles in Persian. What twentieth century scholars of literature called Sabka Hindi (Indian style, or decline), was called by contemporaries the “fresh style” in poetry, and later the “imaginative style” in music. It was the product of figures who belonged to newly more mobile groups. This period and this work remains under-acknowledged, under-studied, and under-theorized because it is simply dismissed as the Indian style.

Kinra raised another important issue related to the rupture thesis. Post-colonial scholarship has entrenched the conviction concerning Indian history that anything before the arrival of European colonists is not only uninteresting, but unknowable. European technologies of knowledge systems, and the arrival of these methods among Indian scholars, is so overwhelming that anything earlier is unknowable, and the archives are tainted because it was the colonial state that created the archive. That closing off of the pre-modern—it may be worse in India than elsewhere—creates problems for global intellectual history generally. Kinra provided a powerful example of the missed opportunities inherent in this way of thinking. For example, in the field of comparative philology, William Jones, the pioneering comparative philologist, is known for having discovered the concept of Indo-European languages, drawing a link between Europe and India in ancient times. What is yet to be thoroughly explored is that Jones learned his Sanskrit grammar from a Hindu munshi who happened to be traveling in England, met Jones at Oxford, and taught him from a Mughal work of philology. According to Kinra, Jones based his own grammar of Sanskrit philology on a legacy of Brahmin scholarship in philology and lexicography that was made available to Jones. Jones learned from a Brahman pundit who taught him about Sanskrit lexicology, and all of the Persian literati at the time would have known the works of Siraj al-din Ali Khan Arzu, one of the most celebrated intellectuals of India at the time, a man of tremendous philological skill who composed profound works of scholarship. Beyond simply compiling lists of words, Arzu was and claimed to be a scholar using methodologies that were more modern than anyone else, including European philologists. Arzu, apparently anticipated Jones’ discovery regarding common linguistic roots. Even more, noted Kinfa, Arzu himself was building on centuries of philological scholarship in Iran, Central Asia, and India. How does one write such a narrative of philology in the Indo-Persian world back into global intellectual history. It is a challenge that may be met in many other areas as well.

Finally, the last paradigmatic problem related to Indian historiography is that India is a special case because Islam in explicitly foregrounded as a problem in a way that is not true in other places. Among certain radical elements in modern India, Islam is viewed as a tumor that needs to be excised from the Hindu and larger Indian body politic. This magnifies the need for paradigm and methodological shifts noted above.

Kathryn Babayan Presentation Summary

Safavi historiography has traditionally been studied through binary lenses of the rise and decline of empire, though the last two decades have marked a critical reevaluation of such staid tropes of study. After the second half of the 17th century, the story goes, decline sets in once the great Shah Abbas I reconfigured Isfahan into a worldly capital (naqsh-I jahan), as he planned out his city and the political economy of his imperium, building a bridge into the Armenian quarters and from there into the world. After him, every other shah was either a drunkard or an opium addict. Debauched kings were seen as the main cause for the Shi’I clergy taking over state affairs, with the help of the Ghulams, or slave soldiers of Georgian and Armenian origins. The paradigm of decline addressed imperial technologies of power, and issues surrounding military and political institutions. In this historiography, the focus has been heavily laid on the palace and seldom on what took place elsewhere in society.

Dr. Babayan described her own intervention in the field as stemming from her interest in hearing voices from below and beyond the court. Inspired by historiographies that emerged as a result of the 1960 experiences of the Civil Rights movement, the Gay Rights movement, Marxist and anti-colonial struggles that allowed for the hearing of other kinds of voices and the writing of other kinds of stories. I was fortunate to be at Princeton when Natalie Zemon Davis was writing about Martin Guerre; her work opened ways of imagining and speculation about the past, just as Cemal Kafadar was seeking ways to get away from the insular history of empires, as he has spoken about earlier in this conference.

Dr. Babayan described two important scholarly moves in the field of Safavi studies: opening up sources outside of chronicles, bringing in poetry, art, and epics for the writing of history, and looking at these sources as cultural production that reveal the historical moments of their creation. In addition to stimulating different ways of reading, the linguistic turn allowed for the gender to inform the discipline of history. She discussed her work on the waning of the Qizilbash that tried to understand popular religiosity of the so called ‘extremists’ on their own terms, as legitimate voices and expressions of Muslim piety, and as valuable subjects of academic inquiry that radically alter our understanding of the Islamic past and complicate/question our textual and Orientalist readings of Islamdom.

Accordingly, her approach depends as much on ‘official’ writings and court produced literature as it does on sources that are often classified – and neglected – as belonging to oral or popular culture (epics and poetry). Taken together, these methods enabled a radical rethinking of the relationship between power and culture, between Safavi sovereignty, Qizilbash devotion and Shi’i Islam. Thus, claims of political power became inseparable from claims of saintly status, giving rise to a long enduring pattern of messianic kingship.

Sources related to magic and the occult sciences such as alchemy, geomancy, astrology, and objects such as talismans experienced similar neglect. Magic and the occult sciences were facts of life in Muslim societies, and pre-dated Islam in those regions by millennia. The longe duree of these practices has been a key factor in their exclusion from modern discourse in Islamic history. Such analyses have not been limited to Islamdom’s place in the history of science. A. J. Arberry struck a similar note as the intrusion of magical practices into late medieval Sufism. Early Sufism, he claimed, had been refreshingly free of obscurantism, but now it was decadent, so charms and amulets acquired special significance in the minds of people no longer confident in reason.

The assessment of the strain of irrationality in Islamic science is linked to ideologies of science, based on elevating science from its medieval base to create modern science by the Europeans, leading to political, military and economic hegemony. This was seen as a necessary stage of scientific progress. The West was said to have rejected its own pre-modern instances of the occult, superstition, and magical thinking in favor of Enlightenment rationality. Magic was the most egregious offender in the blending of nature and culture, and belonged only to primitive societies. Magic was a universal aspect of culture and has endured as a topic in anthropology, a case in point. The category of the Early Modern is a product of this kind of discourse in trying to distinguish the modern West from the pre-modern East.

Prof. Babayan discussed two possible trajectories for dealing with this paradigm. Using the concept of connected histories, Babayan foregrounds materiality—looking at objects and manuscripts as actors themselves, as artifacts. She referred to connected histories as reconceptualized by Sanjay Subrahmanyam (see video link at http://www.muslimmodernities.org/items/browse?tags=Videos+and+Lectures ) To simplify Subrahmanyam’s complex argument: Connected Histories represents as critique of and alternative to comparative histories of Asian and European state formation, which take European developments as the implicit norm and measure of global modernity. The concept refers to the multiple, shared practices – from trade in goods and slaves to journeys of exploration and empire-building – that made Eurasia a zone of interaction and forged linkages between permeable political and cultural entities. In this model, differences in development reside not in a measurable distance or proximity to an abstract set of criteria, but rather in the distinct local manifestations and variations of supra-regional connections and global processes.

Subrahmanyam’s main example, interestingly, stems from the domain of culture rather than economics: millenarian political theology. He discusses how ideological constructs in the service of state formation circulated widely, alongside merchandise and weapons technology, in early modern Eurasia. Muslim and Christian leaders alike believed they were living at the end of time and hence were eager to read the signs correctly and govern accordingly. The political results varied from place to place, often profoundly. Yet elites all over Eurasia shared the same millenarian interest in deciphering the signs and even discussed their interpretations with one another.

Connected histories could also be useful for studying gendered forms of piety in Islam, Christianity and Judaism, traditions with strong parallels whose adherents have interacted in global cities. Babayan’s current work on friendship in Isfahan explores competing masculinities in the early modern world, inspired by Norbert Elias’ charting of a ‘civilizing process’ in early modern Europe through the production and dissemination of pedagogical manuals on proper etiquette, conduct and manners to regulate social behavior and emotional expression. Elias foregrounds the rise of literacy and print making as key phenomena mobilized by confident imperial states to extend their control into the hitherto lightly regulated sites of quotidian religious experience and everyday social intercourse. I challenge Elias’ vantage point, however, by demonstrating that even before print, manuscript-albums were a media of communication that performed similar disciplinary work on the body politic. Moreover, my focus on Iran critically decenters Europe.

Cemal Kafadar, Harvard University

Rajeev Kinra, Northwestern University

Kathryn Babayan, University of Michigan

Cemal Kafadar Presentation Summary

Prof. Kafadar took note of the many paradigm shifts of recent decades of which the historiography of our region is only one. He took note of various factors in international relations such as the post-colonial transformation, the post-Soviet era, and intellectual trends such as post-structuralism within which these paradigm shifts are taking place. Noting the phenomenon of neo-Ottomanism which as taken hold in Turkish studies and even tourism and popular culture, a resurgence and reclaiming of history following a period of downplaying historical studies. I will underline the following interrelated developments. Prof. Kafadar mentioned four areas related to the paradigm shift.

In confronting both the rise and decline narratives, in the past 2-3 decades Ottoman studies scholars have been seeking an alternative narrative framework to the pervasive declinism in analysis of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. It is so deeply embedded in the historiography that we can barely escape it, since it forms the dominant mode of thinking about later Ottoman history. We cannot just give up on the task of confronting it. Simplistic as it seems, decline is a highly effective conceptual tool that enables its users to weave together processes in the political, social, and economic spheres together with a set of descriptive terms related to decline, debauchery, and degeneration.

The terminology question of early modernity is another issue within the larger narrative of world history. Should we designate this post-medieval period as early modernity, or as a post-medieval society that needs to be reckoned with on its own terms? The question of early modernity has been reduced to a matter of political correctness like use of the word decline, but the true task of intellectual significance is to develop an understanding of connectedness and interactivity of various spheres of life: politics, everyday practices, etc. If the term “modern” is to be a meaningful concept one has to deal with the inter-connnectedness of multiple spheres to endow it with meaning, or play with other notions with similar function. I have been trying to understand Ottoman early modernity by looking at the connections between various spheres.

There has been the realization in the field that we cannot continue to do Ottoman history without relating it to trans-regional, transnational frameworks. Prof. Kafadar spoke about the “trans-temporal” dimension of Ottoman history, or viewing the three empires within larger temporal frameworks as our world history colleagues do. Prof. Kafadar called this combined shift of frameworks “the de-Turkification,” or de-centering of the narrative that has privileged the linear story of the Turks from Central Asia to Manzikert. That kind of narrative has configured and constrained the historical imagination in Ottoman studies. Diachronically speaking as well, the embeddedness of Ottoman history—the people, institutions, dynamics, practices—in the medieval, Byzantine past is not sufficiently developed. This same set of issues is also relevant to dealing with the Mughals and Safavids and other Muslim societies. We cannot continue to do Ottoman history without considering contemporaneous societies. The development of connected histories takes into account the larger space that the three empires inhabited, from the Danube to Southeast Asia, and everything around them. The trans-regional turn helps us imagine a space filled with consumer goods and other sorts of linkages [in the early modern period and before], and helps us to back away from merely comparative history in favor of something more meaningful and substantive. Ottoman historians still suffer from something of a stiff neck, with their gaze directed mostly toward Europe, while looking in other directions still requires much more effort. Prof. Kafadar mentioned in this connection his own research on the history of coffeehouses, and the colonization of the nighttime in terms of its broader social and political implications, and common aspects of coffeehouses as part of global consumption patterns and their effects in the political and social spheres. Coffee is only one of the commodities that has a global story that informs the development of the modern world.

Prof. Kafadar further addressed de-centering the ethnicizing narrative, or de-Turkification of Ottoman history. He stressed that Byzantine and Ottoman history are intertwined, and are not “owned” by either Turks or Greeks, but should be pursued within the humanities to bring together the legacies in which each group participated. In addition, setting Ottoman history into a trans-regional frame would include non-Turkish peoples of the former Ottoman world, an effort that is beginning to take place, putting aside self-definition, stories of victimization, and triumphalist narratives alike. The historiography of the Safavid and Mughal empires would also benefit from a similar effort related to getting away from essentialization of ethnic, linguistic identities, especially the Turkish and Iranian.

Rajeev Kinra Presentation Summary

Building upon the drawing of the shaikh with the wine cup in Dr. Farhad’s presentation, Prof. Kinra cited a verse from an eighteenth century Urdu poet that humorously referred to the destruction of the Kaaba, saying it is not the citadel of the heart [of a believer]. Such humor seems incongruous because it doesn’t fit the pervasive narrative of decline in Mughal historiography. According to that narrative, British conquest of the Mughal empire was the only event of importance during that period. Kinra asserted that the decline paradigm is particularly stubborn in Mughal historiography because it is a sub-narrative in the overall narrative of Islamic decline. He described the trajectory of the Mughal history narrative as a parabola, which begins its ascent with Babar arriving in 1526, founding the empire and remaining only four years, followed by Humayun for another brief period, and culminating in the ascension of Akbar, his son, as head of the Mughal empire. Akbar, contemporary of Queen Elizabeth I, reigned from 1556 to1605. He is said to have expanded and consolidated the empire, and ruled as an outward looking, religiously tolerant leader. The lionization of Akbar represents the height of the parabola, which descends with the reign of Jahangir, followed by Shah Jahan, whom everyone knows as the builder of monuments (Taj Mahal, Red Fort, Jama Masjid). The historiography has projected backward its judgment of Aurangzeb as an intolerant champion of orthodoxy and the figure of decline, so that Shah Jahan is seen as having been even a precursor of the later ruler’s orthodoxy in contrast to Akbar. With Aurangzeb the parabola drops sharply, and religious strife, invasion, financial overextension combine to open the door to British takeover. This pre-existing narrative ignores the historical evidence that would contradict it. Because it is wrapped between the decline narrative and the modernization narrative of the British period, it has been very durable.

Dr. Kinra related how his work on Mughal history challenges that entrenched narrative. The first is a problem is one of selection in historical research. After independence 1947, historians were interested in social history, economic history, the history of institutions and the history of war. Mughal economic policy was viewed as important, and institutions were more important than the people who in habited them. Kinra’s own work seeks out individuals who depart from this narrative, such as a Punjabi Brahman official at the Mughal court who rose through imperial secretarial ranks to become Chief Secretary under Shah Jahan. This already disturbs the standard narrative. Kinra’s Brahman official also wrote in Persian on topics like Sufism, Persian poetry, and wrote prose chronicles of shah Jahan’s court, and was the author of many letters, which allow insights into his biography. Such individuals have been little studied because they do not fit the paradigm. Nor does it fit into the decline narrative or the concept of impending orthodoxy, since he continued to work as a court secretary until 1660, well into Aurangzeb’s reign. His writings provide insights into the social history of the institutions. Other, similar material from the Mughal era has been little studied by historians, and later literature has also been either neglected or its use has not been showcased.

The second problem is that the entire period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century is not studied at all in Persian literary history, simply because it has been pre-judged as a literature of decline—a situation described in Persian painting by Dr. Farhad—based on a set of ideals as to what it should have been rather than assessing what it was on its own terms. The fact that Indian writers of Persian poetry are considered as lesser lights than indigenous Persian writers has created an embargo on Indian poets, as well as some Iranian, Turkish and Central Asian poets of the time, because they differ from the norm set by earlier scholars of an Ideal Persian poetry. Kinra argues, in contrast, for a period in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of experimentation in modern literary styles in Persian. What twentieth century scholars of literature called Sabka Hindi (Indian style, or decline), was called by contemporaries the “fresh style” in poetry, and later the “imaginative style” in music. It was the product of figures who belonged to newly more mobile groups. This period and this work remains under-acknowledged, under-studied, and under-theorized because it is simply dismissed as the Indian style.

Kinra raised another important issue related to the rupture thesis. Post-colonial scholarship has entrenched the conviction concerning Indian history that anything before the arrival of European colonists is not only uninteresting, but unknowable. European technologies of knowledge systems, and the arrival of these methods among Indian scholars, is so overwhelming that anything earlier is unknowable, and the archives are tainted because it was the colonial state that created the archive. That closing off of the pre-modern—it may be worse in India than elsewhere—creates problems for global intellectual history generally. Kinra provided a powerful example of the missed opportunities inherent in this way of thinking. For example, in the field of comparative philology, William Jones, the pioneering comparative philologist, is known for having discovered the concept of Indo-European languages, drawing a link between Europe and India in ancient times. What is yet to be thoroughly explored is that Jones learned his Sanskrit grammar from a Hindu munshi who happened to be traveling in England, met Jones at Oxford, and taught him from a Mughal work of philology. According to Kinra, Jones based his own grammar of Sanskrit philology on a legacy of Brahmin scholarship in philology and lexicography that was made available to Jones. Jones learned from a Brahman pundit who taught him about Sanskrit lexicology, and all of the Persian literati at the time would have known the works of Siraj al-din Ali Khan Arzu, one of the most celebrated intellectuals of India at the time, a man of tremendous philological skill who composed profound works of scholarship. Beyond simply compiling lists of words, Arzu was and claimed to be a scholar using methodologies that were more modern than anyone else, including European philologists. Arzu, apparently anticipated Jones’ discovery regarding common linguistic roots. Even more, noted Kinfa, Arzu himself was building on centuries of philological scholarship in Iran, Central Asia, and India. How does one write such a narrative of philology in the Indo-Persian world back into global intellectual history. It is a challenge that may be met in many other areas as well.

Finally, the last paradigmatic problem related to Indian historiography is that India is a special case because Islam in explicitly foregrounded as a problem in a way that is not true in other places. Among certain radical elements in modern India, Islam is viewed as a tumor that needs to be excised from the Hindu and larger Indian body politic. This magnifies the need for paradigm and methodological shifts noted above.

Kathryn Babayan Presentation Summary

Safavi historiography has traditionally been studied through binary lenses of the rise and decline of empire, though the last two decades have marked a critical reevaluation of such staid tropes of study. After the second half of the 17th century, the story goes, decline sets in once the great Shah Abbas I reconfigured Isfahan into a worldly capital (naqsh-I jahan), as he planned out his city and the political economy of his imperium, building a bridge into the Armenian quarters and from there into the world. After him, every other shah was either a drunkard or an opium addict. Debauched kings were seen as the main cause for the Shi’I clergy taking over state affairs, with the help of the Ghulams, or slave soldiers of Georgian and Armenian origins. The paradigm of decline addressed imperial technologies of power, and issues surrounding military and political institutions. In this historiography, the focus has been heavily laid on the palace and seldom on what took place elsewhere in society.

Dr. Babayan described her own intervention in the field as stemming from her interest in hearing voices from below and beyond the court. Inspired by historiographies that emerged as a result of the 1960 experiences of the Civil Rights movement, the Gay Rights movement, Marxist and anti-colonial struggles that allowed for the hearing of other kinds of voices and the writing of other kinds of stories. I was fortunate to be at Princeton when Natalie Zemon Davis was writing about Martin Guerre; her work opened ways of imagining and speculation about the past, just as Cemal Kafadar was seeking ways to get away from the insular history of empires, as he has spoken about earlier in this conference.

Dr. Babayan described two important scholarly moves in the field of Safavi studies: opening up sources outside of chronicles, bringing in poetry, art, and epics for the writing of history, and looking at these sources as cultural production that reveal the historical moments of their creation. In addition to stimulating different ways of reading, the linguistic turn allowed for the gender to inform the discipline of history. She discussed her work on the waning of the Qizilbash that tried to understand popular religiosity of the so called ‘extremists’ on their own terms, as legitimate voices and expressions of Muslim piety, and as valuable subjects of academic inquiry that radically alter our understanding of the Islamic past and complicate/question our textual and Orientalist readings of Islamdom.

Accordingly, her approach depends as much on ‘official’ writings and court produced literature as it does on sources that are often classified – and neglected – as belonging to oral or popular culture (epics and poetry). Taken together, these methods enabled a radical rethinking of the relationship between power and culture, between Safavi sovereignty, Qizilbash devotion and Shi’i Islam. Thus, claims of political power became inseparable from claims of saintly status, giving rise to a long enduring pattern of messianic kingship.

Sources related to magic and the occult sciences such as alchemy, geomancy, astrology, and objects such as talismans experienced similar neglect. Magic and the occult sciences were facts of life in Muslim societies, and pre-dated Islam in those regions by millennia. The longe duree of these practices has been a key factor in their exclusion from modern discourse in Islamic history. Such analyses have not been limited to Islamdom’s place in the history of science. A. J. Arberry struck a similar note as the intrusion of magical practices into late medieval Sufism. Early Sufism, he claimed, had been refreshingly free of obscurantism, but now it was decadent, so charms and amulets acquired special significance in the minds of people no longer confident in reason.

The assessment of the strain of irrationality in Islamic science is linked to ideologies of science, based on elevating science from its medieval base to create modern science by the Europeans, leading to political, military and economic hegemony. This was seen as a necessary stage of scientific progress. The West was said to have rejected its own pre-modern instances of the occult, superstition, and magical thinking in favor of Enlightenment rationality. Magic was the most egregious offender in the blending of nature and culture, and belonged only to primitive societies. Magic was a universal aspect of culture and has endured as a topic in anthropology, a case in point. The category of the Early Modern is a product of this kind of discourse in trying to distinguish the modern West from the pre-modern East.

Prof. Babayan discussed two possible trajectories for dealing with this paradigm. Using the concept of connected histories, Babayan foregrounds materiality—looking at objects and manuscripts as actors themselves, as artifacts. She referred to connected histories as reconceptualized by Sanjay Subrahmanyam (see video link at http://www.muslimmodernities.org/items/browse?tags=Videos+and+Lectures ) To simplify Subrahmanyam’s complex argument: Connected Histories represents as critique of and alternative to comparative histories of Asian and European state formation, which take European developments as the implicit norm and measure of global modernity. The concept refers to the multiple, shared practices – from trade in goods and slaves to journeys of exploration and empire-building – that made Eurasia a zone of interaction and forged linkages between permeable political and cultural entities. In this model, differences in development reside not in a measurable distance or proximity to an abstract set of criteria, but rather in the distinct local manifestations and variations of supra-regional connections and global processes.

Subrahmanyam’s main example, interestingly, stems from the domain of culture rather than economics: millenarian political theology. He discusses how ideological constructs in the service of state formation circulated widely, alongside merchandise and weapons technology, in early modern Eurasia. Muslim and Christian leaders alike believed they were living at the end of time and hence were eager to read the signs correctly and govern accordingly. The political results varied from place to place, often profoundly. Yet elites all over Eurasia shared the same millenarian interest in deciphering the signs and even discussed their interpretations with one another.

Connected histories could also be useful for studying gendered forms of piety in Islam, Christianity and Judaism, traditions with strong parallels whose adherents have interacted in global cities. Babayan’s current work on friendship in Isfahan explores competing masculinities in the early modern world, inspired by Norbert Elias’ charting of a ‘civilizing process’ in early modern Europe through the production and dissemination of pedagogical manuals on proper etiquette, conduct and manners to regulate social behavior and emotional expression. Elias foregrounds the rise of literacy and print making as key phenomena mobilized by confident imperial states to extend their control into the hitherto lightly regulated sites of quotidian religious experience and everyday social intercourse. I challenge Elias’ vantage point, however, by demonstrating that even before print, manuscript-albums were a media of communication that performed similar disciplinary work on the body politic. Moreover, my focus on Iran critically decenters Europe.

Edmund Burke, III, University of California, Berkeley

John Voll, Georgetown University

Jerry Bentley, University of Hawaii, Manoa

Patrick Manning, University of Pittsburgh

Richard Bulliet, Columbia University

Edmund Burke, III Presentation Summary

Is the modern Mediterranean one place with a common history? Or several places, riven by colonialism and culture? Although classical scholars had no problem considering the ancient Mediterranean to be a single historical stage, most scholars of the modern Mediterranean (1450-1914) have tended to view the Inner Sea as a space bifurcated by civilizational forces. With the exception of Fernand Braudel, they held that the Muslim Mediterranean was fated to remain traditional. Despite the findings of the New World History, this myth has continued to shape popular understanding of the lands of Islam. Historians of the Middle East and Islam have been developing a number of strategies to question this approach.

For Edmund Burke III, rethinking the history of the post-1450 Mediterranean begins with locating it in its world historical perspective. [See his article here] In this lecture he deploys three strategies. First, he argues that viewed from East Asia the Mediterranean is a single world space, marked by the legacy of monotheism, Greek Thought, and the heritage of ancient empires. Greek Thought provoked continuous debate within Islam over the role of reason and revelation just as it did within Judaism and Christianity. All three faiths were riven by debate over the limits of prophetic monotheism and the state. And all were durably marked by the legacy of Roman law.

In the early modern period (1450-1750) Burke argues that the Mediterranean region was structured by the same world historical forces, to which its societies responded in largely similar ways. These forces profoundly undermined the capacity of the region to preserve its centrality. While Europe, China and India grew demographically by leaps and bounds in this period, the population of the Mediterranean stagnated. This was due to long-term processes of change (the irreversible decline of ancient agriculture), the persistence of epidemic disease, and climate changes that accompanied the Little Ice Age. In this period the emergence of new systems of economic exchange centered upon the Indian Ocean and (somewhat later) the Atlantic rendered the Mediterranean region increasingly semi-peripheral to the emerging world economy.

In response to the challenge, Mediterranean witnessed the emergence of the Spanish and Ottoman empires alongside smaller states and principalities across the region c. 1500. But continual warfare between the Spanish and Ottoman empires along with its smaller population and weakened economic base had by the end of the century undermined its ability to respond to the emerging states of northwestern Europe. By placing the Mediterranean in a world historical framework Burke argues, we can see the region’s problems were general, a mix of global environmental, political and economic changes. Not only the lands of Islam became underdeveloped. Thus it was that on the eve of modernity (c. 1750), the Mediterranean was plagued by weak state structures, delayed or muffled class formation, agrarian backwardness and the persistence of pastoralism.

Burke locates the onset of modernity in the region over the long nineteenth century (1750-1914) in a regional and global context. In response to its shared problems, he observes that Mediterranean states pursued similar strategies of modernization. Thus both the Iberians and the Ottomans adopted French political and economic reforms and both sought to impose them upon their subject populations. The diffusion of new progress-oriented ideas fueled by the industrial revolution and the French revolution set off internal struggles across the whole region. Everywhere reform-minded elites clashed with the defenders of the old order, and religious authorities, military and bureaucratic elites were all forced to take sides. Radical political ideas, both Left (anarchism) and Right (religious revivalism and neo-traditionalism), vied for influence over elites and non-elites. The debates over the Ottoman tanzimat were in this context just one instance of the larger struggle over French liberal reforms within the region. By 1914, when the historical music changed drastically, Mediterranean liberal elites shared common lifestyles and assumptions about the future, even as nationalism increasingly divided them.

How this context should we understand the coming of colonialism? Burke begins by pointing out that Northern European elites viewed the Mediterranean through orientalist spectacles, as a space of exoticism and backwardness, the better to carry out projects of modernization that deprived peasants and artisans of voice in debating their futures. Settler colonialism was thus but one instance of this broader trend. In conclusion, Burke suggests that a world historical approach to the transformation of the Muslim Mediterranean can provide a real alternative to the familiar civilizational framework.

John Voll Presentation Summary

Prof. Voll’s approach in this presentation differs from the holistic approach. He started with identifying two questions that should not need to be dealt with. In looking at the golden age & decline narrative as it shaped the historiography of the period from 1300-1900, the most popular question is “What Went Wrong”—not a very profitable question, since the answer is “Nothing went wrong.” Rather, what took place was a broad movement of global historical change which has very unproductively been identified as something “going wrong” for Muslims. One might just as easily ask the question, “What went wrong with Roman polytheism?” in which the classical world converted to an eastern religion.

The second question relates to whether or not the tensions of this period reflect a “Clash of Civilizations”? It may be useful to have a concept of civilization as a piece of territory on a map; up to about the 15th century “empire” is also a useful historical concept, as a politically independent, discrete territory with a distinctive culture. “Civilizations, in contrast, are not separate culturally independent entities interacting like billiard balls or fighting wars of conquest. Empires and states fight wars, civilizations do not. Voll proposed that civilizations cease to be viable analytical constructs because of their increasingly intensive interactions in the era from 1300-1900.

In contrast, Voll stated that the two questions to think about are: (1) Where does the era 1300-1900 fit into world history, and (2) Where does the Islamic world fit into this world-historical era 1300-1900. Voll then surveyed world history from the emergence of homo sapiens to the present in 3-4 minutes to describe how this period fits into the larger pattern of world history. Taking as a narrative theme, that human beings in groups live in distinctive lifestyles, there have been four distinctive human lifestyles. Hunting and gathering, farming and herding( at first in small-scale agricultural communities). Then, large-scale urban-agricultural societes developed as cities became major centers of human life. The fourth lifestyle is modern industrial society. Throughout history, humans living in these lifes styles have interacted, with the gathering-hunting and small scale agricultural societies gradually being absorbed by the large urban-agricultural societies.

In our period of 1300-1900, all of the groups were there (with modern industrial societies emerging in the final century), but they were undergoing change. For Muslims in this pattern, there were many pastoral and peasant communities. The most visible players were the really big agricultural communities, namely the Safavid, Ottoman, Mughal empires, as well as Aceh in Southeast Asia, and Songhay in W. Africa. One of the important dynamics of the period was that small-scale nomadic societies no longer had the ability to gain control over large-scale agricultural communities. Using the problematic terminology of “early modern,” this period was characterized by a distinctive mode emerging in which large-scale urban agricultural societies were becoming involved in developing new modes of economic, political, and social institutions.. Coffeehouses as an institution illustrate the impact of this trend. From Ethiopia to Java, coffee drinking transformed the Javanese economy—a matter unrelated to its status regarding Islam. The consumption revolution in coffee, tea, sugar, and potatoes meant that the common life of people had many similar things in common, and popular culture began to involve many new kinds of linkages both outside of and within the structures of the historic empires. This period involved a distinctive mode or phase in the history of large-scale urban agricultural societies. They became increasingly globalized, commodified, and linked in new ways and in new global spaces.

The period was also quite distinctive in religious history. In the broad span of religious traditions within the worldviews developed in the axial period, Islam emerged within the axial traditions that defined the traditions in monotheistic terms. Axial religions went through phases—a prophetic/imaginary (initial) phase, a conversion and expansion phase, a phase of consolidation and definition of orthodoxies, in which neo-axialisms emerged as authoritative and comprehensive articulations of the traditions. Examples are Neo-Confucianism, the reassertion of neo-monotheism by al-Ghazali and Maimonides, and the consolidation of Thomas Acquinas. During the 1300-1900 era, there were many responses to the neo-axialisms, like the Protestant Reformation or renewal movements in a number of societies. Such figures, like Martin Luther or Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab,, were neither medieval nor modern.

This 1300-1900 period fits into world history as a distinctive time at the end of large-scale urban agricultural societies and at the beginning of modern industrial societies. The Muslim regions were a very important part of this period, a region that reflected commodification, religious change, and the use of gunpowder. The answers to the two questions of how does the period fit into world history and how does Islamic history fit into the history of the period help to confirm that questions about “what went wrong” or “clash of civilizations are not relevant to the task of understanding the dynamics of world history in 1300-1900.

Jerry Bentley Presentation Summary

Prof. Bentley noted that the previous two panelists expressed very interesting takes on the forum questions, complementing each other, but he would take on the problem from a different path. Prof. Bentley based his talk on the experience of China as a field of study that has had to extricate itself from a similar narrative. He traced how understanding of China has been transformed over the past generation or so, through such comparative historical “games,” and suggested that understanding the success of that undertaking may be useful to pursuit of a similar project in the case of Islam. As for the second question, Bentley would attempt to sketch an answer toward re-framing the questions.

He noted that some of the groundwork for re-framing is in place, but it takes a lot of groundwork to persuasively re-frame the field out of the assumptions having to do with “modernity.” In doing that for Chinese history, a destructive phase, a phase of myth-busting was necessary, in which the grand assumptions—many Weberian—had to be discarded, in order to clear the ground for more constructive approaches.

Myth-busting in the case of China meant debunking the notions of Oriental despotism, Asiatic mode of production, the ideas that Chinese were incurious, risk-averse, and supposedly hostile to trade. Adam Smith said that the Chinese “hold foreign commerce in the utmost contempt.” This is in the Wealth of Nations. It is remarkable that he could be so wrong, yet it took a generation of empirical scholarship for historians to pull the rug out from under these myths.

On the topic of Islam, there are many received ideas, apart from generalized notions of Oriental despotism, that would benefit from myth-busting. Everyone here knows these points well, but go 50 to 100 yards away from here and it is a different story. One myth is that al-Ghazali made rational thought in Islam impossible, leaving no oxygen for rational thinking. Ahmed Rahim will bust that myth later in this Forum. Another myth is the notion that madrasas didn’t accommodate teaching of science or rational thought—this myth figures prominently in Toby Huff’s book on Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution (2010). I’m pretty sure that there is a problem with Huff’s reading of the madrasas. If accurate information on points like these is confined to the group of people in this room, that’s great for us, but not for understanding the Islamic world in the larger society.

Alongside the destructive phase of the project there needs to be a constructive phase involving basic research and the accumulation of empirical information that makes it possible to build better ways of thinking, and eliminates the possibility of such myths’ return. Some straws are already in the wind, such as Stephen Dale’s work on Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, where we have an actual example of a family firm—not the EIC or VOC, but active agents conducting trade out in the world, and there were many others, totally undermining the old notion that the magical three empires cared nothing about trade. Dale talks about one merchant living in Moscow who contemplated opening a branch on the Baltic—clearly an impressive organizer with a vision. Another straw in the wind in the way of positive empirical studies is Giancarlo Casale’s great new book on The Ottoman Age of Exploration. Does his work suggest that when we find something akin to European experience it must be the same? No. But we find people utilizing intellectual and technological resources for their own purposes. This becomes a part of a package for thinking about the world in a different way. One further straw in the wind: Jacob Burkhardt thought the development of the individual was the beginning of the Modern Subject and the cause of European modernity. Just this morning Prof. Necipoglu mentioned Sinan’s autobiography and evidence of global thinking and self-conscious creativity, showing that individualism was neither inherently nor temporally unique to Europe.

As to the results of the effort to re-frame Chinese history, the provisional synthesis was Ken Pomeranz’ book The Great Divergence -- probably not the last word, but fascinating for its disciplined analysis of China and Europe in a balanced, comparative way with regard to industrial potential. He finds a world of surprising similarities. It would be nice if we also gave attention to unsurprising differences, and beyond that, to the crucial connections and interactions between them. This kind of approach could enable the re-framing of Muslim societies’ history.

In conclusion, Bentley offered a concept of early modernity that can be useful for purposes of this period. Nelly Hanna’s problems with this phrase are well founded, as are Jack Goldstone’s. He cited his own article on “Early Modern Europe and the Early Modern World” as one characterizing the early modern world as a messy place where several large-scale processes were in play, with different effects in different places. Just because the outcomes were not the same does not mean that they were not part of early modernity. Here we can pick up on John Voll’s perspective and try to understand the Islamic world , Europe, the Americas, China, and elsewhere as part of an era of human history in which there were literally global interactions and processes that touched everyone.

Patrick Manning Presentation Summary

Offering advice on re-framing the period, Prof. Manning referred to his recently published book on the African Diaspora from 1400 to 2000 CE, and how it relates to the process of modernity. His chronology was rather like the second question Voll is answering. There were two periods: 1200-1650 CE, an “era of global interactions,” dominated by the Mongols at the beginning and ending with the mariners encircling the global oceans. Between the 14th and 17th centuries, the total world population may actually have declined due to the black death, while losses of population in the Americas later in that period on were immense. There were some declines in the Old World after the discovery of the Americas.

The second period, 1650-1850 CE might be called the “era of a world system (without a hyphen), drawing on some of Wallersteinan divisions. Increases in trade, including the tremendous growth in slavery. The period ends with the Great Divergence, the time of the uprising in India and the Tanzimat in the Ottoman Empire.

As to the first period, the Mongols established a steppe-based empire and seized expanding wealth being produced in Eurasia. As an interesting link, Manning mentioned the empire of Mali which arose with the gold trade at the same time as the Mongol conquests linked the Silk Roads from China in a hemispheric stretch of trade. In Southeast Asia, Srivijaya came to an end, the sea routes were invaded by Kublai Khan, and the Majpahit dominated for some time in the South China Sea in the eastern reaches of the Indian Ocean. For the period around 1350 CE, the time of the Black Death, research is pouring in on the movement of the Black Death, so that it is now understood that the Middle East, South Asia, and according to scattered research, the Red Sea coast and African savannah were hit by this disease due to the huge amount of interconnection, but its impact adversely affected that interaction.

Manning moved to consider the period 1350-1500 CE, characterized by post-Mongol states, with the Timurids, the Golden Horde in a strong position, the beginning of the Ming dynasty, and the expansion of the Ottoman state. The Safavid state formed, Russia expanded, and the Mughal state formed as well. Prof. Manning conjured the image of Timur and Ibn Khaldun conversing outside the walls of Damascus in 1400 CE.

Moving the timeframe a bit later 1450 -1550 CE, more people were living under the sway of empires than at any time earlier in history. Even the Sultanate of Malacca and Songhay 1400-1590s can be included in this sweep. The rise and collapse of that state was important for Muslim history, but especially significant for African history. This period overlaps with the increase in oceanic exchanges during this period, beginning with the 15th century Chinese voyages, the Malay and Iberian mariners linking the oceans. One aspect of Manning’s framework is to link interconnections on land with those at sea. Contact with the Americas resulted in exploitation of wealth and the region’s drastic population decline. Selecting the date 1571 used by Flynn and Giraldez with respect to the flow of silver from America to Asia completes the circuit and marks the beginning of the global silver trade as the first global currency flow.

Manning drew attention to political events, but noted cultural and spiritual changes included in the global shake-up. Challenges to authority of the Catholic Church, to the Islamic ulama’, to Jewish rabbis provided a global framework in that sphere. Mysticism, arising from the need to contact God directly, was arguably connected to the shake-up in the world, a sense that may have been enhanced by the knowledge of the physical limits of the world. He noted that the religions that expand are Christianity and Islam and no longer the others. The Council of Trent, the Ottomans strengthening their hold on the Hejaz, and assuming leadership in the hajj are significant parallels at this time. Dramatic changes in warfare, remarkable expansions in literacy, elite classes at once created and restrained in their spheres of action. Cultural change took place due to exchanges that bring potatoes and other new food crops and commodities.

The period 1650-1850 CE was one of vast expansion in commerce, with silver as a lubricant of commerce in the world. Growing production in textiles such as cotton and linen, production of ceramics in multiple centers and employing new styles and technologies, and the expansion to new classes of consumers of the luxury trade in spices and coffee, all characterized the period. Accordingly, there was an expanded labor demand, and by the mid-17th century this labor demand was largely filled by means of slavery, not just from Africa, but in the Bay of Bengal and the Ganges Valley. Enslavement expanded in Morocco, when Mulay Ismail enslaved Black Moroccans to form his army, introducing a racial dimension to the slavery as never before. The 17th century was a time in which other major states undertook political reforms, realizing the need to systematize in order to control their societies effectively. The Tokugawa regime and the Qing in China are examples of this tendency. Dutch and English constitutionalism hoped to balance land and commercial elites, while French and Russian attempts to control of aristocrats and merchants represent similar trends, many of which succeeded for a period. Spain and the Ottomans, were less successful examples.

As a final summary, Manning described the effort to craft a narrative with emphasis on the whole Islamic world as a parallel and alternative, rather than as substitution for the old paradigm. The effort to take in the entire Islamic world and integrate it into a whole world view is an approach that relies heavily on chronology.

Richard Bulliet Presentation Summary

 Building upon Terry Burke’s comments, I would like to see the Sahara Desert treated in the same way as he describes the Mediterranean. The Sahara is also a connecting geographic feature, and there was a pulse into the adjacent lands. Looking at the Sahara in a world historical manner, we might use the 25-degree North latitude parallel mentioned earlier as a useful division, which cuts straight through the Sahara.

Secondly, to me the most important topic that has not yet been studied in a world historical context over time is the story of the hajj. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world—fourteen centuries of devotion, of going to one place at a given time—which has been viewed as a constant. To the contrary, profound changes to the hajj took place at around 1200 CE, around the time of Salahuddin. It is my contention that the hajj replaced the caliphate as a leading concept, especially in the Muslim south. Soraya Faruqi’s book on the Ottomans & the hajj is helpful, in addition to the survey of the hajj by F.E. Peters on the later period. Before 1100 CE, Makkah had a population of about 5000; people came, made hajj and left, since Makkah lacked the capacity to host large crowds. Symbolizing this is the fact that I have not been unable to find anyone before 1300 CE who was given the honorific “Hajji” as an epithet in the biographical dictionaries. After that, in contrast, it becomes ubiquitous in the biographical dictionaries.

Building on what John Voll said about the consumption revolution of the 16th century, the history of cotton in the medieval period utterly transformed the Muslim world. Cotton went from being almost nonexistent to being almost everywhere in the Muslim world. Italy developed a cotton business in the late 14th and 15th centuries that borrowed heavily from the Middle East. Rice was another transformative commodity.

To address Pat Manning’s periodization, especially regarding slavery and the African Diaspora, it highlights the importance of the Sahara as a connecting zone. As for the Mongol conquests in contrast to the history of the New World under European colonization and domination, we have to factor in the Great Dying; Europeans entered into a post-apocalyptic situation, building upon an ongoing disaster. It has been proved that the Mongols expanded into the Middle East under similar circumstances, in that a climate shift in the 11th century had utterly devastated the economies of Iran, a shift that was parallel to the simultaneous medieval cold period in Northern Europe. The Mongols were not simply the world’s best warriors; they moved into a landscape that had been devastated for a century before their conquest.

Finally, there is the question of a major change in the nature of the Muslim state at some point. I believe that it begins for a complex of reasons in the 12th century, and all of the other Muslim states (except Iran), do not fundamentally revolve around the question of Imamate, or the issue of who is the rightful successor. The question of the successor to the caliphate moves to the side, while the question of who rules has more to do with usurpation or adoption of the title Khadim al-Haramain [Servant of the Two Holy Places]. Salahuddin took this on, and introduced the concept of the Imamate al-Khidma. Not the rightly ordained ruler was paramount after that, but the one who took on the function of protecting the holy places and serving the needs of the Ummah related to them.

Edmund Burke, III, University of California, Berkeley

John Voll, Georgetown University

Jerry Bentley, University of Hawaii, Manoa

Patrick Manning, University of Pittsburgh

Richard Bulliet, Columbia University

Edmund Burke, III Presentation Summary

Is the modern Mediterranean one place with a common history? Or several places, riven by colonialism and culture? Although classical scholars had no problem considering the ancient Mediterranean to be a single historical stage, most scholars of the modern Mediterranean (1450-1914) have tended to view the Inner Sea as a space bifurcated by civilizational forces. With the exception of Fernand Braudel, they held that the Muslim Mediterranean was fated to remain traditional. Despite the findings of the New World History, this myth has continued to shape popular understanding of the lands of Islam. Historians of the Middle East and Islam have been developing a number of strategies to question this approach.

For Edmund Burke III, rethinking the history of the post-1450 Mediterranean begins with locating it in its world historical perspective. [See his article here] In this lecture he deploys three strategies. First, he argues that viewed from East Asia the Mediterranean is a single world space, marked by the legacy of monotheism, Greek Thought, and the heritage of ancient empires. Greek Thought provoked continuous debate within Islam over the role of reason and revelation just as it did within Judaism and Christianity. All three faiths were riven by debate over the limits of prophetic monotheism and the state. And all were durably marked by the legacy of Roman law.

In the early modern period (1450-1750) Burke argues that the Mediterranean region was structured by the same world historical forces, to which its societies responded in largely similar ways. These forces profoundly undermined the capacity of the region to preserve its centrality. While Europe, China and India grew demographically by leaps and bounds in this period, the population of the Mediterranean stagnated. This was due to long-term processes of change (the irreversible decline of ancient agriculture), the persistence of epidemic disease, and climate changes that accompanied the Little Ice Age. In this period the emergence of new systems of economic exchange centered upon the Indian Ocean and (somewhat later) the Atlantic rendered the Mediterranean region increasingly semi-peripheral to the emerging world economy.

In response to the challenge, Mediterranean witnessed the emergence of the Spanish and Ottoman empires alongside smaller states and principalities across the region c. 1500. But continual warfare between the Spanish and Ottoman empires along with its smaller population and weakened economic base had by the end of the century undermined its ability to respond to the emerging states of northwestern Europe. By placing the Mediterranean in a world historical framework Burke argues, we can see the region’s problems were general, a mix of global environmental, political and economic changes. Not only the lands of Islam became underdeveloped. Thus it was that on the eve of modernity (c. 1750), the Mediterranean was plagued by weak state structures, delayed or muffled class formation, agrarian backwardness and the persistence of pastoralism.

Burke locates the onset of modernity in the region over the long nineteenth century (1750-1914) in a regional and global context. In response to its shared problems, he observes that Mediterranean states pursued similar strategies of modernization. Thus both the Iberians and the Ottomans adopted French political and economic reforms and both sought to impose them upon their subject populations. The diffusion of new progress-oriented ideas fueled by the industrial revolution and the French revolution set off internal struggles across the whole region. Everywhere reform-minded elites clashed with the defenders of the old order, and religious authorities, military and bureaucratic elites were all forced to take sides. Radical political ideas, both Left (anarchism) and Right (religious revivalism and neo-traditionalism), vied for influence over elites and non-elites. The debates over the Ottoman tanzimat were in this context just one instance of the larger struggle over French liberal reforms within the region. By 1914, when the historical music changed drastically, Mediterranean liberal elites shared common lifestyles and assumptions about the future, even as nationalism increasingly divided them.

How this context should we understand the coming of colonialism? Burke begins by pointing out that Northern European elites viewed the Mediterranean through orientalist spectacles, as a space of exoticism and backwardness, the better to carry out projects of modernization that deprived peasants and artisans of voice in debating their futures. Settler colonialism was thus but one instance of this broader trend. In conclusion, Burke suggests that a world historical approach to the transformation of the Muslim Mediterranean can provide a real alternative to the familiar civilizational framework.

John Voll Presentation Summary

Prof. Voll’s approach in this presentation differs from the holistic approach. He started with identifying two questions that should not need to be dealt with. In looking at the golden age & decline narrative as it shaped the historiography of the period from 1300-1900, the most popular question is “What Went Wrong”—not a very profitable question, since the answer is “Nothing went wrong.” Rather, what took place was a broad movement of global historical change which has very unproductively been identified as something “going wrong” for Muslims. One might just as easily ask the question, “What went wrong with Roman polytheism?” in which the classical world converted to an eastern religion.

The second question relates to whether or not the tensions of this period reflect a “Clash of Civilizations”? It may be useful to have a concept of civilization as a piece of territory on a map; up to about the 15th century “empire” is also a useful historical concept, as a politically independent, discrete territory with a distinctive culture. “Civilizations, in contrast, are not separate culturally independent entities interacting like billiard balls or fighting wars of conquest. Empires and states fight wars, civilizations do not. Voll proposed that civilizations cease to be viable analytical constructs because of their increasingly intensive interactions in the era from 1300-1900.

In contrast, Voll stated that the two questions to think about are: (1) Where does the era 1300-1900 fit into world history, and (2) Where does the Islamic world fit into this world-historical era 1300-1900. Voll then surveyed world history from the emergence of homo sapiens to the present in 3-4 minutes to describe how this period fits into the larger pattern of world history. Taking as a narrative theme, that human beings in groups live in distinctive lifestyles, there have been four distinctive human lifestyles. Hunting and gathering, farming and herding( at first in small-scale agricultural communities). Then, large-scale urban-agricultural societes developed as cities became major centers of human life. The fourth lifestyle is modern industrial society. Throughout history, humans living in these lifes styles have interacted, with the gathering-hunting and small scale agricultural societies gradually being absorbed by the large urban-agricultural societies.

In our period of 1300-1900, all of the groups were there (with modern industrial societies emerging in the final century), but they were undergoing change. For Muslims in this pattern, there were many pastoral and peasant communities. The most visible players were the really big agricultural communities, namely the Safavid, Ottoman, Mughal empires, as well as Aceh in Southeast Asia, and Songhay in W. Africa. One of the important dynamics of the period was that small-scale nomadic societies no longer had the ability to gain control over large-scale agricultural communities. Using the problematic terminology of “early modern,” this period was characterized by a distinctive mode emerging in which large-scale urban agricultural societies were becoming involved in developing new modes of economic, political, and social institutions.. Coffeehouses as an institution illustrate the impact of this trend. From Ethiopia to Java, coffee drinking transformed the Javanese economy—a matter unrelated to its status regarding Islam. The consumption revolution in coffee, tea, sugar, and potatoes meant that the common life of people had many similar things in common, and popular culture began to involve many new kinds of linkages both outside of and within the structures of the historic empires. This period involved a distinctive mode or phase in the history of large-scale urban agricultural societies. They became increasingly globalized, commodified, and linked in new ways and in new global spaces.

The period was also quite distinctive in religious history. In the broad span of religious traditions within the worldviews developed in the axial period, Islam emerged within the axial traditions that defined the traditions in monotheistic terms. Axial religions went through phases—a prophetic/imaginary (initial) phase, a conversion and expansion phase, a phase of consolidation and definition of orthodoxies, in which neo-axialisms emerged as authoritative and comprehensive articulations of the traditions. Examples are Neo-Confucianism, the reassertion of neo-monotheism by al-Ghazali and Maimonides, and the consolidation of Thomas Acquinas. During the 1300-1900 era, there were many responses to the neo-axialisms, like the Protestant Reformation or renewal movements in a number of societies. Such figures, like Martin Luther or Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab,, were neither medieval nor modern.

This 1300-1900 period fits into world history as a distinctive time at the end of large-scale urban agricultural societies and at the beginning of modern industrial societies. The Muslim regions were a very important part of this period, a region that reflected commodification, religious change, and the use of gunpowder. The answers to the two questions of how does the period fit into world history and how does Islamic history fit into the history of the period help to confirm that questions about “what went wrong” or “clash of civilizations are not relevant to the task of understanding the dynamics of world history in 1300-1900.

Jerry Bentley Presentation Summary

Prof. Bentley noted that the previous two panelists expressed very interesting takes on the forum questions, complementing each other, but he would take on the problem from a different path. Prof. Bentley based his talk on the experience of China as a field of study that has had to extricate itself from a similar narrative. He traced how understanding of China has been transformed over the past generation or so, through such comparative historical “games,” and suggested that understanding the success of that undertaking may be useful to pursuit of a similar project in the case of Islam. As for the second question, Bentley would attempt to sketch an answer toward re-framing the questions.

He noted that some of the groundwork for re-framing is in place, but it takes a lot of groundwork to persuasively re-frame the field out of the assumptions having to do with “modernity.” In doing that for Chinese history, a destructive phase, a phase of myth-busting was necessary, in which the grand assumptions—many Weberian—had to be discarded, in order to clear the ground for more constructive approaches.

Myth-busting in the case of China meant debunking the notions of Oriental despotism, Asiatic mode of production, the ideas that Chinese were incurious, risk-averse, and supposedly hostile to trade. Adam Smith said that the Chinese “hold foreign commerce in the utmost contempt.” This is in the Wealth of Nations. It is remarkable that he could be so wrong, yet it took a generation of empirical scholarship for historians to pull the rug out from under these myths.

On the topic of Islam, there are many received ideas, apart from generalized notions of Oriental despotism, that would benefit from myth-busting. Everyone here knows these points well, but go 50 to 100 yards away from here and it is a different story. One myth is that al-Ghazali made rational thought in Islam impossible, leaving no oxygen for rational thinking. Ahmed Rahim will bust that myth later in this Forum. Another myth is the notion that madrasas didn’t accommodate teaching of science or rational thought—this myth figures prominently in Toby Huff’s book on Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution (2010). I’m pretty sure that there is a problem with Huff’s reading of the madrasas. If accurate information on points like these is confined to the group of people in this room, that’s great for us, but not for understanding the Islamic world in the larger society.

Alongside the destructive phase of the project there needs to be a constructive phase involving basic research and the accumulation of empirical information that makes it possible to build better ways of thinking, and eliminates the possibility of such myths’ return. Some straws are already in the wind, such as Stephen Dale’s work on Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, where we have an actual example of a family firm—not the EIC or VOC, but active agents conducting trade out in the world, and there were many others, totally undermining the old notion that the magical three empires cared nothing about trade. Dale talks about one merchant living in Moscow who contemplated opening a branch on the Baltic—clearly an impressive organizer with a vision. Another straw in the wind in the way of positive empirical studies is Giancarlo Casale’s great new book on The Ottoman Age of Exploration. Does his work suggest that when we find something akin to European experience it must be the same? No. But we find people utilizing intellectual and technological resources for their own purposes. This becomes a part of a package for thinking about the world in a different way. One further straw in the wind: Jacob Burkhardt thought the development of the individual was the beginning of the Modern Subject and the cause of European modernity. Just this morning Prof. Necipoglu mentioned Sinan’s autobiography and evidence of global thinking and self-conscious creativity, showing that individualism was neither inherently nor temporally unique to Europe.

As to the results of the effort to re-frame Chinese history, the provisional synthesis was Ken Pomeranz’ book The Great Divergence -- probably not the last word, but fascinating for its disciplined analysis of China and Europe in a balanced, comparative way with regard to industrial potential. He finds a world of surprising similarities. It would be nice if we also gave attention to unsurprising differences, and beyond that, to the crucial connections and interactions between them. This kind of approach could enable the re-framing of Muslim societies’ history.

In conclusion, Bentley offered a concept of early modernity that can be useful for purposes of this period. Nelly Hanna’s problems with this phrase are well founded, as are Jack Goldstone’s. He cited his own article on “Early Modern Europe and the Early Modern World” as one characterizing the early modern world as a messy place where several large-scale processes were in play, with different effects in different places. Just because the outcomes were not the same does not mean that they were not part of early modernity. Here we can pick up on John Voll’s perspective and try to understand the Islamic world , Europe, the Americas, China, and elsewhere as part of an era of human history in which there were literally global interactions and processes that touched everyone.

Patrick Manning Presentation Summary

Offering advice on re-framing the period, Prof. Manning referred to his recently published book on the African Diaspora from 1400 to 2000 CE, and how it relates to the process of modernity. His chronology was rather like the second question Voll is answering. There were two periods: 1200-1650 CE, an “era of global interactions,” dominated by the Mongols at the beginning and ending with the mariners encircling the global oceans. Between the 14th and 17th centuries, the total world population may actually have declined due to the black death, while losses of population in the Americas later in that period on were immense. There were some declines in the Old World after the discovery of the Americas.

The second period, 1650-1850 CE might be called the “era of a world system (without a hyphen), drawing on some of Wallersteinan divisions. Increases in trade, including the tremendous growth in slavery. The period ends with the Great Divergence, the time of the uprising in India and the Tanzimat in the Ottoman Empire.

As to the first period, the Mongols established a steppe-based empire and seized expanding wealth being produced in Eurasia. As an interesting link, Manning mentioned the empire of Mali which arose with the gold trade at the same time as the Mongol conquests linked the Silk Roads from China in a hemispheric stretch of trade. In Southeast Asia, Srivijaya came to an end, the sea routes were invaded by Kublai Khan, and the Majpahit dominated for some time in the South China Sea in the eastern reaches of the Indian Ocean. For the period around 1350 CE, the time of the Black Death, research is pouring in on the movement of the Black Death, so that it is now understood that the Middle East, South Asia, and according to scattered research, the Red Sea coast and African savannah were hit by this disease due to the huge amount of interconnection, but its impact adversely affected that interaction.

Manning moved to consider the period 1350-1500 CE, characterized by post-Mongol states, with the Timurids, the Golden Horde in a strong position, the beginning of the Ming dynasty, and the expansion of the Ottoman state. The Safavid state formed, Russia expanded, and the Mughal state formed as well. Prof. Manning conjured the image of Timur and Ibn Khaldun conversing outside the walls of Damascus in 1400 CE.

Moving the timeframe a bit later 1450 -1550 CE, more people were living under the sway of empires than at any time earlier in history. Even the Sultanate of Malacca and Songhay 1400-1590s can be included in this sweep. The rise and collapse of that state was important for Muslim history, but especially significant for African history. This period overlaps with the increase in oceanic exchanges during this period, beginning with the 15th century Chinese voyages, the Malay and Iberian mariners linking the oceans. One aspect of Manning’s framework is to link interconnections on land with those at sea. Contact with the Americas resulted in exploitation of wealth and the region’s drastic population decline. Selecting the date 1571 used by Flynn and Giraldez with respect to the flow of silver from America to Asia completes the circuit and marks the beginning of the global silver trade as the first global currency flow.

Manning drew attention to political events, but noted cultural and spiritual changes included in the global shake-up. Challenges to authority of the Catholic Church, to the Islamic ulama’, to Jewish rabbis provided a global framework in that sphere. Mysticism, arising from the need to contact God directly, was arguably connected to the shake-up in the world, a sense that may have been enhanced by the knowledge of the physical limits of the world. He noted that the religions that expand are Christianity and Islam and no longer the others. The Council of Trent, the Ottomans strengthening their hold on the Hejaz, and assuming leadership in the hajj are significant parallels at this time. Dramatic changes in warfare, remarkable expansions in literacy, elite classes at once created and restrained in their spheres of action. Cultural change took place due to exchanges that bring potatoes and other new food crops and commodities.

The period 1650-1850 CE was one of vast expansion in commerce, with silver as a lubricant of commerce in the world. Growing production in textiles such as cotton and linen, production of ceramics in multiple centers and employing new styles and technologies, and the expansion to new classes of consumers of the luxury trade in spices and coffee, all characterized the period. Accordingly, there was an expanded labor demand, and by the mid-17th century this labor demand was largely filled by means of slavery, not just from Africa, but in the Bay of Bengal and the Ganges Valley. Enslavement expanded in Morocco, when Mulay Ismail enslaved Black Moroccans to form his army, introducing a racial dimension to the slavery as never before. The 17th century was a time in which other major states undertook political reforms, realizing the need to systematize in order to control their societies effectively. The Tokugawa regime and the Qing in China are examples of this tendency. Dutch and English constitutionalism hoped to balance land and commercial elites, while French and Russian attempts to control of aristocrats and merchants represent similar trends, many of which succeeded for a period. Spain and the Ottomans, were less successful examples.

As a final summary, Manning described the effort to craft a narrative with emphasis on the whole Islamic world as a parallel and alternative, rather than as substitution for the old paradigm. The effort to take in the entire Islamic world and integrate it into a whole world view is an approach that relies heavily on chronology.

Richard Bulliet Presentation Summary

 Building upon Terry Burke’s comments, I would like to see the Sahara Desert treated in the same way as he describes the Mediterranean. The Sahara is also a connecting geographic feature, and there was a pulse into the adjacent lands. Looking at the Sahara in a world historical manner, we might use the 25-degree North latitude parallel mentioned earlier as a useful division, which cuts straight through the Sahara.

Secondly, to me the most important topic that has not yet been studied in a world historical context over time is the story of the hajj. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world—fourteen centuries of devotion, of going to one place at a given time—which has been viewed as a constant. To the contrary, profound changes to the hajj took place at around 1200 CE, around the time of Salahuddin. It is my contention that the hajj replaced the caliphate as a leading concept, especially in the Muslim south. Soraya Faruqi’s book on the Ottomans & the hajj is helpful, in addition to the survey of the hajj by F.E. Peters on the later period. Before 1100 CE, Makkah had a population of about 5000; people came, made hajj and left, since Makkah lacked the capacity to host large crowds. Symbolizing this is the fact that I have not been unable to find anyone before 1300 CE who was given the honorific “Hajji” as an epithet in the biographical dictionaries. After that, in contrast, it becomes ubiquitous in the biographical dictionaries.

Building on what John Voll said about the consumption revolution of the 16th century, the history of cotton in the medieval period utterly transformed the Muslim world. Cotton went from being almost nonexistent to being almost everywhere in the Muslim world. Italy developed a cotton business in the late 14th and 15th centuries that borrowed heavily from the Middle East. Rice was another transformative commodity.

To address Pat Manning’s periodization, especially regarding slavery and the African Diaspora, it highlights the importance of the Sahara as a connecting zone. As for the Mongol conquests in contrast to the history of the New World under European colonization and domination, we have to factor in the Great Dying; Europeans entered into a post-apocalyptic situation, building upon an ongoing disaster. It has been proved that the Mongols expanded into the Middle East under similar circumstances, in that a climate shift in the 11th century had utterly devastated the economies of Iran, a shift that was parallel to the simultaneous medieval cold period in Northern Europe. The Mongols were not simply the world’s best warriors; they moved into a landscape that had been devastated for a century before their conquest.

Finally, there is the question of a major change in the nature of the Muslim state at some point. I believe that it begins for a complex of reasons in the 12th century, and all of the other Muslim states (except Iran), do not fundamentally revolve around the question of Imamate, or the issue of who is the rightful successor. The question of the successor to the caliphate moves to the side, while the question of who rules has more to do with usurpation or adoption of the title Khadim al-Haramain [Servant of the Two Holy Places]. Salahuddin took this on, and introduced the concept of the Imamate al-Khidma. Not the rightly ordained ruler was paramount after that, but the one who took on the function of protecting the holy places and serving the needs of the Ummah related to them.

Giancarlo Casale, University of Minnesota

Gabor Agoston, Georgetown University

Baki Tezcan, University of California, Davis

Himmet Taskomur, Harvard University

Giancarlo Casale Presentation Summary

Prof. Casale provided a segue between the world historians’ presentations and what followed from the specialists. His presentation centered on two touchstones in the grand narratives of both Western and Islamic civilization.

He began by explaining that In the traditional narrative of “Islamic Civilization” the caliphate plays a central role in the construction of a golden age and decline—the golden age being closely associated with the Caliphate’s period of greatest political integration, and decline being linked to the subsequent disintegration of the caliphate and its eventual demise at the hands of the Mongols. Some centuries later, the Ottoman sultan became associated with the caliphate, and continued to be so until the end of the Ottoman empire in the early twentieth century. But there is great disagreement about the line of transmission: some historians insisting on a direct and continuous “transfer of the caliphate” from the Abbasids upon the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517, others asserting that the Ottoman caliphate was a modern innovation with little basis in history prior to the nineteenth century.

Meanwhile, in the grand narrative of “Western Civ” it is the Age of Exploration that serves as the critical lynchpin, marking the historical moment in which European history becomes world history. Europeans encountered the world, explored the world, and then conquered the world, bringing their models of government, their economic systems, and their intellectual traditions to others as a template for modernity. This presents a fundamental problem for world historians devoted to developing non-Eurocentric paradigms of global integration, because there is no way around the fact that Europeans were the first to encircle the globe, ushering in conquest, colonization and other manifestations of western dominance.

Having explained the historiographical problems presented by the caliphate and the Age of Exploration, Prof. Casale then proposed bringing the two narratives together in a productive and useful way. He began by showing the image of a medallion coined for Phillip II of Spain that commemorated the unification in 1581 of the Spanish and Portuguese empires under his rule. It contains the motto is: “The world is not enough,” symbolizing the inexorable drive behind the Age of Exploration that he termed “the dialectic of universal sovereignty.”

Casale then outlined three essential components of this phenomenon: The first was a new geographic understanding of the world as a globe, a space that was now recognized for the first time as finite. The second was a realization that, as a finite space, the globe itself was now a legitimate object of political ambition—a realization that led to a fundamental change in the meaning of “universal sovereignty,” and the development of new ideologies of empire directed toward the project of political control of the globe. Finally, this new geographical consciousness, combined with these new ideologies of empire, enabled a new kind of political agency, by means of which Europeans were actually able to mobilize resources and coordinate activity on a scale necessary to found world-encompassing overseas empires. But crucially, it was the geographical consciousness and the political ideology that were necessary preconditions of action—not the reverse. This is perhaps best exemplified by the Treaty of Tordesillas, signed in 1494, in which Spain and Portugal agreed to divide the world between them, granting Portugal domination of the eastern and Spain the western hemisphere. At the time, neither power controlled a single inch of territory anywhere in Asia or the New World. But the agreement nevertheless led to the founding of two world empires within just a generation.

From the perspective of world history, however, we are still left with a basic question: Was this new, finite concept of universal sovereignty, of such fundamental importance to early Western expansion, unique to Europeans, or something historians can apply more broadly during the period to the Islamic world as well?

To answer this question, Prof. Casale turned to the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. There, as he argued, the Portuguese king claimed, in theory, to be “Lord of the Navigation and Commerce” of the entire region. But in practice, the Portuguese expressed this claim by preventing Muslim merchants and pilgrims of the Indian Ocean from entering the the Red Sea, so as to control the important trade route to and from Egypt and to restrict the hajj. As a result, for first time in history there was a non-Muslim power in the Indian Ocean that made it impossible for Muslims to travel by sea to Mecca and Medina.

Prof. Casale explained that it was from this starting point—an ideologically driven Portuguese action that necessarily provoked a Muslim counter reaction—that we can trace the beginning of what he called the “dialectic of the universal sovereign.”

To begin with, Muslims of the Indian Ocean responded to this aggression by casting around for an ideology that would help them defend themselves from Portuguese actions. This led them to revive the concept of “the caliphate,” a long moribund institution, led by a “caliph” responsible for defending and protecting the faith and its adherents against all outside threats. Less clear, however, was who this caliph might be. One possibility was the ruler of whichever power had territorial control of Makkah and Medina and, consequently, the title of “Protector of the Holy Cities”—a status enjoyed, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, by the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt. But soon thereafter, in 1517, the Mamluks were overthrown, and control of the holy cities passed to the Ottomans. When this happened, although the Ottomans themselves may not have been immediately aware of it, the association of the caliphate with the Ottoman sultan permanently took root among the Muslims of the Indian Ocean.

From the Ottoman perspective, this presented both a huge challenge and an enormous opportunity. On the one hand, because the title of “caliph” implied that the sultan was responsible for protecting the well-being of Muslims everywhere, failure would mean loss of legitimacy. Theoretically, the Sultan’s prestige could thus be undermined because of a failure to protect people who lived thousands of miles outside of the territory he controlled—even in places unknown to him. On the other hand, if he could find some way protect the interests of these people, then the ideology of universal sovereignty promised to turn all of those people into an international constituency of loyal subjects, allowing the sultan to mobilize people and resources on a global scale that would otherwise be unimaginable.

Over the course of the sixteenth century, Casale argued, the Ottomans became quite adept at using this to their advantage, by constructing a vast “soft empire” in the Indian Ocean that reached its apex in the 1560s. To illustrate this point, he showed two maps depicting the extent of Ottoman diplomatic involvement with various Muslim constituencies in the Indian Ocean, and the military activity that resulted from their alliances. The first map showed a series of crescents indicating the places in the Indian Ocean where the Sultan’s name was read in the Friday Khutba—all situated along the main maritime hajj routes in a line connecting the Arabian peninsula with the Maldives, South Asia, Ceylon, and Southeast Asia. The second map showed the resulting military activity that was coordinated through this network—with “battle stars” showing places where there was a military encounter between the Portuguese and local Muslims with support from the Ottoman sultan’s forces.

As he explained these maps, Casale emphasized the extensiveness of this military and political coordination—carried out across such an expansive geographic range that it would have been inconceivable before the sixteenth century. And this, in turn, presents a fundamental challenge to the idea that the rise and fall of empires is a “zero-sum game,” in which the “Rise of the West” necessarily implies the decline of Islam. Instead, Casale’s research demonstrates that the Ottomans’ massive, hemispheric imperial project, predicated on the revival of the “Universal Caliphate,” was only possible because the Portuguese had first staked a rival ideological claim against which the Ottomans could present themselves as champions. Indeed, according to Casale’s analysis, it was the Ottomans who were ultimately successful in forcing the Portuguese to stop trying to control trade in the Indian Ocean, and to allow the Muslim maritime pilgrimage routes to once more flow unobstructed. But ironically, once this was accomplished, it deprived the Ottoman sultanate of the ideological leverage of the Portuguese, rendering their own imperial project untenable. Thus, it was more akin to a mutually dependent relationship, rather than a zero-sum game.

Moreover, the concept of “dialectic” is useful because this notion of universal sovereignty had a life of its own even after the Ottomans and the Portuguese were no longer in the picture. As the Ottomans developed these rival claims to universal sovereignty, other Muslim powers developed their own, new ideological elaborations of universal rulership within this newly understood, finite global context, and eventually those bumped up against each other.

To demonstrate this, Casale ended his presentation with the famous Mughal painting commemorating the peace treaty between the Mughal Emperor Jahangir and the Persian Shah Abbas, in which the two sovereigns embrace while standing on top of a European-style globe. This iconic illustration shows how new idea of the globe as a finite space, as a legitimate object of political ambition, was also a concept that by the early seventeenth century served as a backdrop for even local forms of political competition that now had nothing to do with either the Portuguese or the Ottomans.

Casale concluded by suggesting that there is a direct line between the kind of concretized universal sovereignty depicted in this painting, and the political formation that many historians would consider the end-game of modernity—the modern nation-state system, in which the world’s territory is divided up into mutually exclusive, theoretically equivalent nation-states that in their totality define human political existence. Casale argued that if we really want to understand how we got to that place, then we need to deal seriously with the early modern as a world historical concept, and not simply as the product of Western history. That requires a concept of early modernity that is does not simply involve the “contributions” of Islam, but that is itself produced out of the interactions between Europeans, Muslims, and others in a dialectically productive relationship.

Gabor Agoston Presentation Summary

In the 1980s and 1990s one of the major paradigms in warfare studies was the military revolution debate. The theory of a military revolution attempted to explain the rise of absolutist states and the rise of the west as a whole, as well as the decline of the rest. When reading these European studies, Prof. Agoston said he was struck that the Ottomans, who were one of the strongest military powers in the sixteenth seventeenth centuries, were relegated into the background of the debate. He encountered the following major theories related to Ottoman military power and prowess: Islamic conservatism and military despotism militated against borrowing Western techniques and against native inventiveness, and continued dependence on Western technology and know-how in the form of European cannon-founders and technicians; that the Ottomans suffered from technical inferiority in spite of borrowing western techniques; the lack of secure property and intellectual property law was is supposed to have hindered advances in mining technology; they are said to have lacked the necessary knowledge and manufacturing capacity to produce effective and sufficient weapons.

This theory abounds in western textbooks, despite its flaws. First, the theories are monocausal, trying to explain complex processes such as the adoption and adaptation of weapons technologies with a single factor. They neglect social and economic context. They attribute to technology a much greater role than it actually played in pre-industrial warfare. Agoston asserts that technology didn’t really affect warfare until weapons were standardized in the nineteenth century. Technical inventiveness was overemphasized, while the quantity of armaments was more important than their quality. The assumptions behind these theories are based on selective and atypical evidence that have been proven in recent years to be factually wrong. Agoston has criticized these points in his archival research and demonstrated that the Ottomans created the necessary organization and financial framework to ensure prompt and efficient production and supply of ammunition and sufficient supply of weaponry early in their history. The ability of central and local administration to adjust them according to the social and economic conditions allowed the Ottomans to achieve self-sufficiency in armaments production and to maintain it for centuries, in some areas well into the eighteenth century.

The Ottomans’ continued use of non-gunpowder weapons was perhaps widespread, but religion played barely any role in that decision. Muslim states adjusted their weapons and techniques to that of their enemies with relative ease and did not hesitate to adopt new weapons and techniques when faced with enemies equipped with those weapons. The history of diffusion demonstrates that the contribution of European technicians to Ottoman military arms industry and weapons technology should not be exaggerated. Inviting and employing foreign technicians was the prime means throughout Europe to acquire new technology, and was not unique to the Ottomans. The assistance of craftsmen considered to be on the cutting edge at a certain point in time was inevitable. The Ottomans were no exception, and took part in this exchange of early modern weapons technology of the fifteenth and sixteenth century. The Ottomans were in an ideal position for technological diffusion, with Istanbul/Constantinople in the latter fifteenth and sixteenth century a hub like NYC today. In the sixteenth century, after Venice, Rome, and Madrid, Istanbul was a major center of international politics, espionage, information gathering, and diplomacy. People went there to sell their expertise and share knowledge; miners from Serbia, Bosnia, Greece, and Asia Minor brought their knowledge of metallurgy, whereas Muslim blacksmiths from the Islamic east manufactured the famous Damascus blades. Miners, sappers, and gun founders from Germany, eastern Europe, France, England and the Netherlands came there. Dalmatian and Greek shipwrights were involved in a technical dialogue. There was no iron curtain in the Mediterranean in the early modern world. It is difficult to understand how serious historians could state the opposite.

For the sixteenth century, it is one thing to question these Orientalist & Eurocentric biases, but it is another to offer an alternative narrative, as Prof. Agoston did in the second part of his lecture. His research asked what happened to the Ottomans to undermine their military prowess, not “what went wrong.” By the eighteenth century, the Ottomans were defeated by the Habsburgs and by the Russians. Instead of accepting the received chronology of decline or accepting that the western divergence appeared right after the conquest of Constantinople, there must be another explanation. Supposedly the Ottomans were so mesmerized by huge cannons that they continued to cast huge cannons while the Europeans cast smaller, more mobile cannon. According to Agoston’s research, this claim is untrue, based only on the accounts of European travelers to Istanbul and the Dardanelles and who knew nothing about cannon casting. The source for the composition of Ottoman artillery is not travelers but the account books of the Ottoman Imperial Cannon Foundry or Topane,. Agoston compiled figures on how many cannons and what kind of cannons were cast, and these figures were compared to the European cannons to discover that the figures are no different in each case. So the theory about Ottoman giant (and obsolete) cannons is unfounded.

To discover what happened by the end of the eighteenth century, in contrast, Agoston suggests that it is necessary to study the rise of Europe eastern powers—the Ottoman, Hapsburg, and Russian Empires. In the Habsburg case, they reformed their military in the sixteenth century partly in response to Ottoman military and firepower superiority . What matters is that both Muscovy and the Austrian Habsburgs reacted to Ottoman military power, and in the case of Muscovy, also to the Tatar challenge in the sixteenth and part of the seventeenth century. Both Muscovy and the Ottomans had their time of troubles and revolts, and both empires were exposed to new types of Western military technologies—the Ottomans on the Hungarian frontier, and in the case of Muscovy, Swedish, Polish and Lithuanian forces. He asserted that they responded differently. The Muscovites moved toward a more centralized military and eventually discarded the cavalry going for a new model army, using Western-type formations. In the Ottoman case, a decentralization took place, meaning that the center’s access to and control over resources was much more limited. Whereas in the middle of the sixteenth century, the center had controlled almost 60% of tax revenues, by the 1660s this figure had dropped to 24%. There was no major population boom in the Ottoman empire, but Russia expanded in terms of population. The Russians also adopted conscription. Whereas in the sixteenth century, the two empires’ capability to mobilize armies was comparable, by the mid-eighteenth century the Russians could mobilize a military potential that was three times what the Ottoman Empire could mobilize. Comparison of revenues gives a similar result, although the divergence did not occur until the eighteenth century. In the 1740s the revenues of the two empires were comparable, but by the 1780s, Russian revenues were seven-fold those of the Ottomans, and by 1795, they were 10-fold if the conversion of the currency into tons of silver is accurate, noting that Pamuk’s figures differ somewhat on the conversion.

From a regional standpoint, in this whole realm there are responses to challenges but the responses led to different results. The Russians evolved into an absolutist , or fiscal-military state, whereas the Ottomans went through a devolution of power, or using Baki Tezcan’s terminology, the Ottomans became a limited monarchy whose access to resources was also limited. The responses led to two different types of state, which eventually led to differing military capabilities and power. Whereas the Muscovites reformed along Western lines, the sultan needed to rely on an available source-the Ayans or local notables. Agoston suggested that the Ayans were part of this military devolution and that the question of Ottoman decentralization could be explained in the wider context of military devolution and the military contractor and military entrepreneur. The contract system was an effective way to maintain a military capacity that far exceeded the sultan’s direct access to resources. Agoston concluded by posing the question of whether the ad hoc measures that eventually led to devolution were introduced because Istanbul had to fight rivals—especially Russia—which had more access to human and military resources than Istanbul, and thus had greater military capacity.

Baki Tezcan Presentation Summary

Prof. Tezcan began by asking, “Did it decline or did it not decline, that is the question, or is it really?” Historians of the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East have been arguing against the decline paradigm for more than 35 years now, and it was declared a myth 15 years ago, yet we are still here countering its main arguments. Historians of the region have failed to produce a model as attractive to non-specialists as decline. Prof. Tezcan joined Prof. Voll in suggesting that we simply put forward our own model. Acknowledging recent developments in South Asian historiography that shift the discourse from rise and decline with a focus on empires, instead train the focus on socio-economic and cultural transformations. In other words, shift from Ottoman Empire to Ottoman society.

It would be futile to deny that the Ottoman Empire did not lose territory or suffer decline in its ability to fight. Queen Elizabeth I sought an alliance with the Ottoman Empire against the Spanish in the sixteenth century; had there been a UN Security Council then, the Ottomans would have been a permanent member. By the 1880s, things had changed, with Europeans collecting taxes in the Ottoman Empire and directly transferring funds to Ottoman creditors. The empire’s international standing had indeed declined.

The focus on society might circumvent the decline concept . It could make a positive contribution to western historiography in terms of thinking about the non-West in the early modern period as a real player in world history rather than as a spectator, whose only contribution was to adapt Western models. As suggested in Prof. Tezcan’s responses to the Forum Questions, it is possible to narrate early modern Ottoman history as a period of social mobility. Rather than engaging with the decline paradigm to refute it as a whole, it can be marginalized by suggesting a different viewing angle.

Taking inspiration from various historians, including Cemal Kafadar and Engin Akarli, Tezcan argued that the Ottoman polity underwent profound transformation in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—a transformation so profound that it deserves to be called the second empire, replacing the patrimonial Ottoman Empire so closely associated with the reign of Sulayman the Magnificent (1520-1566 CE). This formation called the second empire was marked administratively by an early modern state as opposed to a medieval dynastic institution, culturally by an early modern sensibility, economically by a relatively more market oriented economy, and legally by a more unified legal system that came to exert some authority over the dynasty. Monetarily, it had a relatively more unified currency. Politically, it had developed a type of limited government that grew out of the interaction between legal processes that might be called “civil”-ization, and proto-democratization. Socially, it was marked by a relatively less stratified society. For Tezcan, the term proto-democracy refers to the process by which a much larger segment of the imperial administration came to consist of men formerly known as “outsiders” (ajnaby) to previous elites dominated by the military slaves of the emperor. Men involved in civilian areas took on new roles, replacing the Mamluks, and in doing so “civilianized” the empire.

He argued that the sixteenth century was marked by the monetization of the empire, a process that furthered the social standing of those who benefitted from this process, such as merchants and financiers. Monetization resulted in political empowerment, the rising political profile of jurists’ law, based on the shari’ah, which at times challenged the imperial qanun. Empowerment of the shari’ah and its interpreters was not a symptom of decline or a result of conservatism, but an outcome of the society becoming more market-oriented.

The age of the second empire was marked by two related developments. One was the expansion of the political nation—the tension that developed between old and new elites. The other was re-configuration of the dynasty’s role within the expanding political nation. These developments created two positions Tezcan labeled absolutist and constitutionalist. No Ottoman man or woman would have used these terms, but it is possible to identify these two distinct political positions in late sixteenth and seventeenth century with regard to the Sultan’s authority and its limits. The absolutist position was based on public law, on the functioning of the Ottoman sovereign order subject to no restrictions, while the constitutionalist position was built upon the denial of such an indefinite source of authority to the Sultan. “Constitutionalism” aimed at limiting royal prerogatives by expanding the power of the law.

Expansion of the political nation did not place every newcomer into the same political space. Some upwardly mobile commoners entered the provincial political elite, as so many did in the late sixteenth century, leading to the well known Jalali Rebellions. Others entered the elite who were entrenched in the imperial capital, as many others did at the same time, leading to inflation of the group that served the imperial apparatus. Both groups sought to ensure the confirmation of their political status and engaged in a struggle to obtain that end. The relative monetization of the economy in the late fifteenth and sixteenth century made it possible for such merchants and financiers to buy their way into the elites, and forced existing elites to form alliances with them, or take an active stance against them. The political struggle took place on the boundaries of royal authority between old and new elites. One’s place in relation to the political divide between the absolutist and constitutionalist positions was determined by one’s answer to the question of who had the authority to determine the fundamentals of public law: the Sultan who had laid down a constitution for eternity, or the jurists. Those who would benefit from a powerful court pushed to extend the reach of royal authority deep into the domain of public law. Those supporting jurists’ law and its political empowerment were lords of the law, the mawali, who prepared the ground for the increasing intervention of jurist’s law in the affairs of the Ottoman dynasty during the sixteenth century.

The economic transformation in the fifteenth and sixteenth century impacted the political configuration of the Ottoman Empire. In the feudal system, the object of power was domination of land through the military from the peasants at the bottom to the monarch at the top. While land remained important, gradual development of a market society shifted the primary focus of political power toward the control of monetary resources through a network of patron-client relationships in a web-like structure without a single center. The political actors—the constitutionalists—wanted to place the monarch at the symbolic center, but without power. The absolutists wanted to leave the sultan in control of the spinning the web. The Ottoman sultanate responded to efforts to limit its authority as well as it could.

The sultanate had managed to transform the feudal order of the formative period of the Ottoman Empire between lord and vassals into patrimonial relations between the emperor and his slaves. Senior slaves also transferred political power from the sultan’s hands into their own, by means of the developing market economy. In response, the emperor empowered court officers who never before had political power, such as chief eunuch or chief gardener. A new generation of viziers who were court creatures without autonomous power centers emerged, but Ottoman absolutism couldn’t withstand the power of the Janissaries, who changed themselves into a corporation with serious investments in crafts and trades with middle and lower class members. When Janissaries learned to forge alliances with jurists, they could depose or even murder the sultans and enthrone new ones.

Regicides of the long seventeenth century—the sultan’s murder at the hands of his own slaves—opened fissures among the sultan, his household, and his dominion: the imperial political structure constructed by Mehmet and perfected by Suleyman which had grown out of the feudal political practices of the formative period. In the late sixteenth century, the sultanate began to lose agency in selecting his slaves, and the ajnaby (foreigners) entered this political organization. The seventeenth century regicides resulted in the sultan’s slaves selecting their master; the sultan lost control of his household and hence his empire.

Thus, argued Tezcan, the decline narrative might be replaced by focus on socio-economic transformations, highlighting development of what Sir James Porter (1747-1762) called “a species of limited monarchy.” Tezcan calls this the second Ottoman Empire. The fact that the region we came to call the Middle East, corresponding roughly to the Ottoman Empire, had a foundation of limited government even before the founding of the United States has obvious implications for rewriting the history of this region in the wake of recent developments.

I leave the audience with the implications of the fact that the region we came to call the Middle East, which corresponds roughly to the Ottoman Empire, had a foundation of limited government even before the founding of the United States. Emphasizing this tradition of limited government should also have obvious implications for the rewriting of history of the Middle East in the wake of recent developments. Let me conclude with a disclaimer. I am not suggesting that the Ottoman Empire did not decline, nor that the decline can be explained by citing Ottoman authoritarianism in response to European colonialism and the rise of nationalism. Both developments are important to understanding what led to the end of the Ottoman Empire.

In the second empire, however, there was progress in many spheres of life, such as easing of a relatively rigid system of social mobility in imperial structures. In other spheres movement was not so positive, such as the military and the production of knowledge. Social and political progress and the limitation of royal authority was related to setbacks in military and scientific progress. Expansion of the power of new groups proved hazardous to imperial military power and resulted in territorial losses. Empowerment of jurists and their laws contributed to the gradual limits on royal power and created setbacks in scientific innovation. The ulama’ focused more and more on law, and less on other fields of knowledge. Legalistic thought laid claim to truth. Jurists became more juridical than scholarly, and while this led to proto-democratic, limited monarchy, it may have stifled other forms of intellectual inquiry among this group of elites.

Himmet Taskomur Presentation Summary

As a legal historian of the late medieval and early modern period, Prof. Taskomur observed certain divergences in this period. From a disciplinary standpoint, there seemed to be no room to accommodate fiqh literature in the field of historical inquiry as opposed to the field of theology. Taskomur noted that fiqh has been studied as an aspect of “Islamic law” similar to that described by Prof. Necipoglu in “Islamic art.” According to this discourse, the schools of law, whether Sunni or Shi’i, are reduced to “Islamic Law.” It is parallel to the essentialist, timeless idea of “Islamic Art.”

This discourse on the history of fiqh is based on two concepts—ijtihad and taqlid—without going into historicity and theoretical debates. Disciplinary debate was about whether jurists in a particular period carried out ijtihad or practiced taqlid, reading the all of legal history through these two terms. The second problem was reading the history of fiqh as a linear narrative, originating in Makkah and Madinah moving on to Damascus, then Baghdad, and on to the present day. This reading disregards a multi-polar legal tradition of complex scholarship that has changed throughout Islamic history, in addition to its associated regional histories. The third problem is the failure to look at the social and other contexts in which of theories and opinions came to be held, how deliberations and debates played out within a particular tradition. Prof. Taskomur reminded the audience that Islamic law did not follow a single linear story line. Historical studies on specific topics such as women or economics have tended to move abruptly from Abu Hanifa’s views to those of twentieth century jurists on the topic.

In the regional context, Taskomur described the problem of Ottoman republican historiography in which the history of law has been viewed as a dichotomy of the shari’ah as static, unchanging law vs. rationally grounded, secular qanun. Ottoman legal studies rely on qadi court documents, the most exploited sources for legal history, under the assumption that this body of source material represents law in practice, whereas fiqh material is regarded as a frozen and closed area. The historical approach regarding legal sources and fiqh of this period has suffered total disregard. Added to this is the notion that nothing changed, since this was claimed to be an age of decline. Taskomur noted that Prof. Kafadar had already mentioned the ethnicization of Ottoman law, Turkish law existing alongside Arab law, as though knowledge production of the fatwa were vernacular legal scholarship. Taskomur argued that the ethnic dimension of fiqh studies is a very marginal phenomenon.

He outlined his approach to the fiqh texts: asking questions about their authors and the social context, inquiring into the institutional and cultural framework in which this body of knowledge was produced and reproduced. From the early fourteenth to the late sixteenth centuries, there was an increase in the establishment of madrasas for legal training in the Ottoman context. From 1324-1580 CE in western Anatolia and the Balkans, more than 300 madrasas were newly established—an enormous number considering what previously existed in Anatolia, which does not include those established by the Mamluks. Along with this institutional boom, there was an increase in literacy in urban areas, which had direct bearing on the nature of legal discussions. Taskomur inquires into the Ottoman scholarly tradition, its ethos and ideals, also in disciplines of learning such as ilm al-balaga, logic, and the idea of scholarly verification of juristic proofs.

There was a spirit of competition for jobs and prestige in Islamic scholarly tradition, and an examination system was introduced for applicants to institutional positions, somewhat parallel to the Chinese civil examination system. An applicant was required to answer questions revealing his point of view on those matters. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this examination had become institutionalized.

There are a number of areas outside fiqh and qanun that developed as regional phenomena in the law, such as Ottoman engagement with Safavids and Europeans in maritime law, international law, and commercial law that developed during this period, with reference to Prof. Tezcan’s discussion of monetization and the market economy in the second empire.

Another notable feature was the public nature of the Ottoman legal discussion. Pamphleteering and the development of a new genre of the legal risale [letter] flourished in the sixteenth century, underlining the public nature of fiqh. These writings display several characteristics: They are argumentative; they cite multiple sources and utilize footnotes and references, and the texts were open to public scrutiny as opposed to being closed works for internal or courtly consumption only. Prof. Taskomur showed an example (see PPT in video) of another type of source for legal history, a treatise by Mehmet Effendi, from the sixteenth century, showing marginal notes by an anonymous reader. In sum, the faqih as a scholar is not one who imitates but one who verifies.

Giancarlo Casale, University of Minnesota

Gabor Agoston, Georgetown University

Baki Tezcan, University of California, Davis

Himmet Taskomur, Harvard University

Giancarlo Casale Presentation Summary

Prof. Casale provided a segue between the world historians’ presentations and what followed from the specialists. His presentation centered on two touchstones in the grand narratives of both Western and Islamic civilization.

He began by explaining that In the traditional narrative of “Islamic Civilization” the caliphate plays a central role in the construction of a golden age and decline—the golden age being closely associated with the Caliphate’s period of greatest political integration, and decline being linked to the subsequent disintegration of the caliphate and its eventual demise at the hands of the Mongols. Some centuries later, the Ottoman sultan became associated with the caliphate, and continued to be so until the end of the Ottoman empire in the early twentieth century. But there is great disagreement about the line of transmission: some historians insisting on a direct and continuous “transfer of the caliphate” from the Abbasids upon the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517, others asserting that the Ottoman caliphate was a modern innovation with little basis in history prior to the nineteenth century.

Meanwhile, in the grand narrative of “Western Civ” it is the Age of Exploration that serves as the critical lynchpin, marking the historical moment in which European history becomes world history. Europeans encountered the world, explored the world, and then conquered the world, bringing their models of government, their economic systems, and their intellectual traditions to others as a template for modernity. This presents a fundamental problem for world historians devoted to developing non-Eurocentric paradigms of global integration, because there is no way around the fact that Europeans were the first to encircle the globe, ushering in conquest, colonization and other manifestations of western dominance.

Having explained the historiographical problems presented by the caliphate and the Age of Exploration, Prof. Casale then proposed bringing the two narratives together in a productive and useful way. He began by showing the image of a medallion coined for Phillip II of Spain that commemorated the unification in 1581 of the Spanish and Portuguese empires under his rule. It contains the motto is: “The world is not enough,” symbolizing the inexorable drive behind the Age of Exploration that he termed “the dialectic of universal sovereignty.”

Casale then outlined three essential components of this phenomenon: The first was a new geographic understanding of the world as a globe, a space that was now recognized for the first time as finite. The second was a realization that, as a finite space, the globe itself was now a legitimate object of political ambition—a realization that led to a fundamental change in the meaning of “universal sovereignty,” and the development of new ideologies of empire directed toward the project of political control of the globe. Finally, this new geographical consciousness, combined with these new ideologies of empire, enabled a new kind of political agency, by means of which Europeans were actually able to mobilize resources and coordinate activity on a scale necessary to found world-encompassing overseas empires. But crucially, it was the geographical consciousness and the political ideology that were necessary preconditions of action—not the reverse. This is perhaps best exemplified by the Treaty of Tordesillas, signed in 1494, in which Spain and Portugal agreed to divide the world between them, granting Portugal domination of the eastern and Spain the western hemisphere. At the time, neither power controlled a single inch of territory anywhere in Asia or the New World. But the agreement nevertheless led to the founding of two world empires within just a generation.

From the perspective of world history, however, we are still left with a basic question: Was this new, finite concept of universal sovereignty, of such fundamental importance to early Western expansion, unique to Europeans, or something historians can apply more broadly during the period to the Islamic world as well?

To answer this question, Prof. Casale turned to the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. There, as he argued, the Portuguese king claimed, in theory, to be “Lord of the Navigation and Commerce” of the entire region. But in practice, the Portuguese expressed this claim by preventing Muslim merchants and pilgrims of the Indian Ocean from entering the the Red Sea, so as to control the important trade route to and from Egypt and to restrict the hajj. As a result, for first time in history there was a non-Muslim power in the Indian Ocean that made it impossible for Muslims to travel by sea to Mecca and Medina.

Prof. Casale explained that it was from this starting point—an ideologically driven Portuguese action that necessarily provoked a Muslim counter reaction—that we can trace the beginning of what he called the “dialectic of the universal sovereign.”

To begin with, Muslims of the Indian Ocean responded to this aggression by casting around for an ideology that would help them defend themselves from Portuguese actions. This led them to revive the concept of “the caliphate,” a long moribund institution, led by a “caliph” responsible for defending and protecting the faith and its adherents against all outside threats. Less clear, however, was who this caliph might be. One possibility was the ruler of whichever power had territorial control of Makkah and Medina and, consequently, the title of “Protector of the Holy Cities”—a status enjoyed, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, by the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt. But soon thereafter, in 1517, the Mamluks were overthrown, and control of the holy cities passed to the Ottomans. When this happened, although the Ottomans themselves may not have been immediately aware of it, the association of the caliphate with the Ottoman sultan permanently took root among the Muslims of the Indian Ocean.

From the Ottoman perspective, this presented both a huge challenge and an enormous opportunity. On the one hand, because the title of “caliph” implied that the sultan was responsible for protecting the well-being of Muslims everywhere, failure would mean loss of legitimacy. Theoretically, the Sultan’s prestige could thus be undermined because of a failure to protect people who lived thousands of miles outside of the territory he controlled—even in places unknown to him. On the other hand, if he could find some way protect the interests of these people, then the ideology of universal sovereignty promised to turn all of those people into an international constituency of loyal subjects, allowing the sultan to mobilize people and resources on a global scale that would otherwise be unimaginable.

Over the course of the sixteenth century, Casale argued, the Ottomans became quite adept at using this to their advantage, by constructing a vast “soft empire” in the Indian Ocean that reached its apex in the 1560s. To illustrate this point, he showed two maps depicting the extent of Ottoman diplomatic involvement with various Muslim constituencies in the Indian Ocean, and the military activity that resulted from their alliances. The first map showed a series of crescents indicating the places in the Indian Ocean where the Sultan’s name was read in the Friday Khutba—all situated along the main maritime hajj routes in a line connecting the Arabian peninsula with the Maldives, South Asia, Ceylon, and Southeast Asia. The second map showed the resulting military activity that was coordinated through this network—with “battle stars” showing places where there was a military encounter between the Portuguese and local Muslims with support from the Ottoman sultan’s forces.

As he explained these maps, Casale emphasized the extensiveness of this military and political coordination—carried out across such an expansive geographic range that it would have been inconceivable before the sixteenth century. And this, in turn, presents a fundamental challenge to the idea that the rise and fall of empires is a “zero-sum game,” in which the “Rise of the West” necessarily implies the decline of Islam. Instead, Casale’s research demonstrates that the Ottomans’ massive, hemispheric imperial project, predicated on the revival of the “Universal Caliphate,” was only possible because the Portuguese had first staked a rival ideological claim against which the Ottomans could present themselves as champions. Indeed, according to Casale’s analysis, it was the Ottomans who were ultimately successful in forcing the Portuguese to stop trying to control trade in the Indian Ocean, and to allow the Muslim maritime pilgrimage routes to once more flow unobstructed. But ironically, once this was accomplished, it deprived the Ottoman sultanate of the ideological leverage of the Portuguese, rendering their own imperial project untenable. Thus, it was more akin to a mutually dependent relationship, rather than a zero-sum game.

Moreover, the concept of “dialectic” is useful because this notion of universal sovereignty had a life of its own even after the Ottomans and the Portuguese were no longer in the picture. As the Ottomans developed these rival claims to universal sovereignty, other Muslim powers developed their own, new ideological elaborations of universal rulership within this newly understood, finite global context, and eventually those bumped up against each other.

To demonstrate this, Casale ended his presentation with the famous Mughal painting commemorating the peace treaty between the Mughal Emperor Jahangir and the Persian Shah Abbas, in which the two sovereigns embrace while standing on top of a European-style globe. This iconic illustration shows how new idea of the globe as a finite space, as a legitimate object of political ambition, was also a concept that by the early seventeenth century served as a backdrop for even local forms of political competition that now had nothing to do with either the Portuguese or the Ottomans.

Casale concluded by suggesting that there is a direct line between the kind of concretized universal sovereignty depicted in this painting, and the political formation that many historians would consider the end-game of modernity—the modern nation-state system, in which the world’s territory is divided up into mutually exclusive, theoretically equivalent nation-states that in their totality define human political existence. Casale argued that if we really want to understand how we got to that place, then we need to deal seriously with the early modern as a world historical concept, and not simply as the product of Western history. That requires a concept of early modernity that is does not simply involve the “contributions” of Islam, but that is itself produced out of the interactions between Europeans, Muslims, and others in a dialectically productive relationship.

Gabor Agoston Presentation Summary

In the 1980s and 1990s one of the major paradigms in warfare studies was the military revolution debate. The theory of a military revolution attempted to explain the rise of absolutist states and the rise of the west as a whole, as well as the decline of the rest. When reading these European studies, Prof. Agoston said he was struck that the Ottomans, who were one of the strongest military powers in the sixteenth seventeenth centuries, were relegated into the background of the debate. He encountered the following major theories related to Ottoman military power and prowess: Islamic conservatism and military despotism militated against borrowing Western techniques and against native inventiveness, and continued dependence on Western technology and know-how in the form of European cannon-founders and technicians; that the Ottomans suffered from technical inferiority in spite of borrowing western techniques; the lack of secure property and intellectual property law was is supposed to have hindered advances in mining technology; they are said to have lacked the necessary knowledge and manufacturing capacity to produce effective and sufficient weapons.

This theory abounds in western textbooks, despite its flaws. First, the theories are monocausal, trying to explain complex processes such as the adoption and adaptation of weapons technologies with a single factor. They neglect social and economic context. They attribute to technology a much greater role than it actually played in pre-industrial warfare. Agoston asserts that technology didn’t really affect warfare until weapons were standardized in the nineteenth century. Technical inventiveness was overemphasized, while the quantity of armaments was more important than their quality. The assumptions behind these theories are based on selective and atypical evidence that have been proven in recent years to be factually wrong. Agoston has criticized these points in his archival research and demonstrated that the Ottomans created the necessary organization and financial framework to ensure prompt and efficient production and supply of ammunition and sufficient supply of weaponry early in their history. The ability of central and local administration to adjust them according to the social and economic conditions allowed the Ottomans to achieve self-sufficiency in armaments production and to maintain it for centuries, in some areas well into the eighteenth century.

The Ottomans’ continued use of non-gunpowder weapons was perhaps widespread, but religion played barely any role in that decision. Muslim states adjusted their weapons and techniques to that of their enemies with relative ease and did not hesitate to adopt new weapons and techniques when faced with enemies equipped with those weapons. The history of diffusion demonstrates that the contribution of European technicians to Ottoman military arms industry and weapons technology should not be exaggerated. Inviting and employing foreign technicians was the prime means throughout Europe to acquire new technology, and was not unique to the Ottomans. The assistance of craftsmen considered to be on the cutting edge at a certain point in time was inevitable. The Ottomans were no exception, and took part in this exchange of early modern weapons technology of the fifteenth and sixteenth century. The Ottomans were in an ideal position for technological diffusion, with Istanbul/Constantinople in the latter fifteenth and sixteenth century a hub like NYC today. In the sixteenth century, after Venice, Rome, and Madrid, Istanbul was a major center of international politics, espionage, information gathering, and diplomacy. People went there to sell their expertise and share knowledge; miners from Serbia, Bosnia, Greece, and Asia Minor brought their knowledge of metallurgy, whereas Muslim blacksmiths from the Islamic east manufactured the famous Damascus blades. Miners, sappers, and gun founders from Germany, eastern Europe, France, England and the Netherlands came there. Dalmatian and Greek shipwrights were involved in a technical dialogue. There was no iron curtain in the Mediterranean in the early modern world. It is difficult to understand how serious historians could state the opposite.

For the sixteenth century, it is one thing to question these Orientalist & Eurocentric biases, but it is another to offer an alternative narrative, as Prof. Agoston did in the second part of his lecture. His research asked what happened to the Ottomans to undermine their military prowess, not “what went wrong.” By the eighteenth century, the Ottomans were defeated by the Habsburgs and by the Russians. Instead of accepting the received chronology of decline or accepting that the western divergence appeared right after the conquest of Constantinople, there must be another explanation. Supposedly the Ottomans were so mesmerized by huge cannons that they continued to cast huge cannons while the Europeans cast smaller, more mobile cannon. According to Agoston’s research, this claim is untrue, based only on the accounts of European travelers to Istanbul and the Dardanelles and who knew nothing about cannon casting. The source for the composition of Ottoman artillery is not travelers but the account books of the Ottoman Imperial Cannon Foundry or Topane,. Agoston compiled figures on how many cannons and what kind of cannons were cast, and these figures were compared to the European cannons to discover that the figures are no different in each case. So the theory about Ottoman giant (and obsolete) cannons is unfounded.

To discover what happened by the end of the eighteenth century, in contrast, Agoston suggests that it is necessary to study the rise of Europe eastern powers—the Ottoman, Hapsburg, and Russian Empires. In the Habsburg case, they reformed their military in the sixteenth century partly in response to Ottoman military and firepower superiority . What matters is that both Muscovy and the Austrian Habsburgs reacted to Ottoman military power, and in the case of Muscovy, also to the Tatar challenge in the sixteenth and part of the seventeenth century. Both Muscovy and the Ottomans had their time of troubles and revolts, and both empires were exposed to new types of Western military technologies—the Ottomans on the Hungarian frontier, and in the case of Muscovy, Swedish, Polish and Lithuanian forces. He asserted that they responded differently. The Muscovites moved toward a more centralized military and eventually discarded the cavalry going for a new model army, using Western-type formations. In the Ottoman case, a decentralization took place, meaning that the center’s access to and control over resources was much more limited. Whereas in the middle of the sixteenth century, the center had controlled almost 60% of tax revenues, by the 1660s this figure had dropped to 24%. There was no major population boom in the Ottoman empire, but Russia expanded in terms of population. The Russians also adopted conscription. Whereas in the sixteenth century, the two empires’ capability to mobilize armies was comparable, by the mid-eighteenth century the Russians could mobilize a military potential that was three times what the Ottoman Empire could mobilize. Comparison of revenues gives a similar result, although the divergence did not occur until the eighteenth century. In the 1740s the revenues of the two empires were comparable, but by the 1780s, Russian revenues were seven-fold those of the Ottomans, and by 1795, they were 10-fold if the conversion of the currency into tons of silver is accurate, noting that Pamuk’s figures differ somewhat on the conversion.

From a regional standpoint, in this whole realm there are responses to challenges but the responses led to different results. The Russians evolved into an absolutist , or fiscal-military state, whereas the Ottomans went through a devolution of power, or using Baki Tezcan’s terminology, the Ottomans became a limited monarchy whose access to resources was also limited. The responses led to two different types of state, which eventually led to differing military capabilities and power. Whereas the Muscovites reformed along Western lines, the sultan needed to rely on an available source-the Ayans or local notables. Agoston suggested that the Ayans were part of this military devolution and that the question of Ottoman decentralization could be explained in the wider context of military devolution and the military contractor and military entrepreneur. The contract system was an effective way to maintain a military capacity that far exceeded the sultan’s direct access to resources. Agoston concluded by posing the question of whether the ad hoc measures that eventually led to devolution were introduced because Istanbul had to fight rivals—especially Russia—which had more access to human and military resources than Istanbul, and thus had greater military capacity.

Baki Tezcan Presentation Summary

Prof. Tezcan began by asking, “Did it decline or did it not decline, that is the question, or is it really?” Historians of the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East have been arguing against the decline paradigm for more than 35 years now, and it was declared a myth 15 years ago, yet we are still here countering its main arguments. Historians of the region have failed to produce a model as attractive to non-specialists as decline. Prof. Tezcan joined Prof. Voll in suggesting that we simply put forward our own model. Acknowledging recent developments in South Asian historiography that shift the discourse from rise and decline with a focus on empires, instead train the focus on socio-economic and cultural transformations. In other words, shift from Ottoman Empire to Ottoman society.

It would be futile to deny that the Ottoman Empire did not lose territory or suffer decline in its ability to fight. Queen Elizabeth I sought an alliance with the Ottoman Empire against the Spanish in the sixteenth century; had there been a UN Security Council then, the Ottomans would have been a permanent member. By the 1880s, things had changed, with Europeans collecting taxes in the Ottoman Empire and directly transferring funds to Ottoman creditors. The empire’s international standing had indeed declined.

The focus on society might circumvent the decline concept . It could make a positive contribution to western historiography in terms of thinking about the non-West in the early modern period as a real player in world history rather than as a spectator, whose only contribution was to adapt Western models. As suggested in Prof. Tezcan’s responses to the Forum Questions, it is possible to narrate early modern Ottoman history as a period of social mobility. Rather than engaging with the decline paradigm to refute it as a whole, it can be marginalized by suggesting a different viewing angle.

Taking inspiration from various historians, including Cemal Kafadar and Engin Akarli, Tezcan argued that the Ottoman polity underwent profound transformation in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—a transformation so profound that it deserves to be called the second empire, replacing the patrimonial Ottoman Empire so closely associated with the reign of Sulayman the Magnificent (1520-1566 CE). This formation called the second empire was marked administratively by an early modern state as opposed to a medieval dynastic institution, culturally by an early modern sensibility, economically by a relatively more market oriented economy, and legally by a more unified legal system that came to exert some authority over the dynasty. Monetarily, it had a relatively more unified currency. Politically, it had developed a type of limited government that grew out of the interaction between legal processes that might be called “civil”-ization, and proto-democratization. Socially, it was marked by a relatively less stratified society. For Tezcan, the term proto-democracy refers to the process by which a much larger segment of the imperial administration came to consist of men formerly known as “outsiders” (ajnaby) to previous elites dominated by the military slaves of the emperor. Men involved in civilian areas took on new roles, replacing the Mamluks, and in doing so “civilianized” the empire.

He argued that the sixteenth century was marked by the monetization of the empire, a process that furthered the social standing of those who benefitted from this process, such as merchants and financiers. Monetization resulted in political empowerment, the rising political profile of jurists’ law, based on the shari’ah, which at times challenged the imperial qanun. Empowerment of the shari’ah and its interpreters was not a symptom of decline or a result of conservatism, but an outcome of the society becoming more market-oriented.

The age of the second empire was marked by two related developments. One was the expansion of the political nation—the tension that developed between old and new elites. The other was re-configuration of the dynasty’s role within the expanding political nation. These developments created two positions Tezcan labeled absolutist and constitutionalist. No Ottoman man or woman would have used these terms, but it is possible to identify these two distinct political positions in late sixteenth and seventeenth century with regard to the Sultan’s authority and its limits. The absolutist position was based on public law, on the functioning of the Ottoman sovereign order subject to no restrictions, while the constitutionalist position was built upon the denial of such an indefinite source of authority to the Sultan. “Constitutionalism” aimed at limiting royal prerogatives by expanding the power of the law.

Expansion of the political nation did not place every newcomer into the same political space. Some upwardly mobile commoners entered the provincial political elite, as so many did in the late sixteenth century, leading to the well known Jalali Rebellions. Others entered the elite who were entrenched in the imperial capital, as many others did at the same time, leading to inflation of the group that served the imperial apparatus. Both groups sought to ensure the confirmation of their political status and engaged in a struggle to obtain that end. The relative monetization of the economy in the late fifteenth and sixteenth century made it possible for such merchants and financiers to buy their way into the elites, and forced existing elites to form alliances with them, or take an active stance against them. The political struggle took place on the boundaries of royal authority between old and new elites. One’s place in relation to the political divide between the absolutist and constitutionalist positions was determined by one’s answer to the question of who had the authority to determine the fundamentals of public law: the Sultan who had laid down a constitution for eternity, or the jurists. Those who would benefit from a powerful court pushed to extend the reach of royal authority deep into the domain of public law. Those supporting jurists’ law and its political empowerment were lords of the law, the mawali, who prepared the ground for the increasing intervention of jurist’s law in the affairs of the Ottoman dynasty during the sixteenth century.

The economic transformation in the fifteenth and sixteenth century impacted the political configuration of the Ottoman Empire. In the feudal system, the object of power was domination of land through the military from the peasants at the bottom to the monarch at the top. While land remained important, gradual development of a market society shifted the primary focus of political power toward the control of monetary resources through a network of patron-client relationships in a web-like structure without a single center. The political actors—the constitutionalists—wanted to place the monarch at the symbolic center, but without power. The absolutists wanted to leave the sultan in control of the spinning the web. The Ottoman sultanate responded to efforts to limit its authority as well as it could.

The sultanate had managed to transform the feudal order of the formative period of the Ottoman Empire between lord and vassals into patrimonial relations between the emperor and his slaves. Senior slaves also transferred political power from the sultan’s hands into their own, by means of the developing market economy. In response, the emperor empowered court officers who never before had political power, such as chief eunuch or chief gardener. A new generation of viziers who were court creatures without autonomous power centers emerged, but Ottoman absolutism couldn’t withstand the power of the Janissaries, who changed themselves into a corporation with serious investments in crafts and trades with middle and lower class members. When Janissaries learned to forge alliances with jurists, they could depose or even murder the sultans and enthrone new ones.

Regicides of the long seventeenth century—the sultan’s murder at the hands of his own slaves—opened fissures among the sultan, his household, and his dominion: the imperial political structure constructed by Mehmet and perfected by Suleyman which had grown out of the feudal political practices of the formative period. In the late sixteenth century, the sultanate began to lose agency in selecting his slaves, and the ajnaby (foreigners) entered this political organization. The seventeenth century regicides resulted in the sultan’s slaves selecting their master; the sultan lost control of his household and hence his empire.

Thus, argued Tezcan, the decline narrative might be replaced by focus on socio-economic transformations, highlighting development of what Sir James Porter (1747-1762) called “a species of limited monarchy.” Tezcan calls this the second Ottoman Empire. The fact that the region we came to call the Middle East, corresponding roughly to the Ottoman Empire, had a foundation of limited government even before the founding of the United States has obvious implications for rewriting the history of this region in the wake of recent developments.

I leave the audience with the implications of the fact that the region we came to call the Middle East, which corresponds roughly to the Ottoman Empire, had a foundation of limited government even before the founding of the United States. Emphasizing this tradition of limited government should also have obvious implications for the rewriting of history of the Middle East in the wake of recent developments. Let me conclude with a disclaimer. I am not suggesting that the Ottoman Empire did not decline, nor that the decline can be explained by citing Ottoman authoritarianism in response to European colonialism and the rise of nationalism. Both developments are important to understanding what led to the end of the Ottoman Empire.

In the second empire, however, there was progress in many spheres of life, such as easing of a relatively rigid system of social mobility in imperial structures. In other spheres movement was not so positive, such as the military and the production of knowledge. Social and political progress and the limitation of royal authority was related to setbacks in military and scientific progress. Expansion of the power of new groups proved hazardous to imperial military power and resulted in territorial losses. Empowerment of jurists and their laws contributed to the gradual limits on royal power and created setbacks in scientific innovation. The ulama’ focused more and more on law, and less on other fields of knowledge. Legalistic thought laid claim to truth. Jurists became more juridical than scholarly, and while this led to proto-democratic, limited monarchy, it may have stifled other forms of intellectual inquiry among this group of elites.

Himmet Taskomur Presentation Summary

As a legal historian of the late medieval and early modern period, Prof. Taskomur observed certain divergences in this period. From a disciplinary standpoint, there seemed to be no room to accommodate fiqh literature in the field of historical inquiry as opposed to the field of theology. Taskomur noted that fiqh has been studied as an aspect of “Islamic law” similar to that described by Prof. Necipoglu in “Islamic art.” According to this discourse, the schools of law, whether Sunni or Shi’i, are reduced to “Islamic Law.” It is parallel to the essentialist, timeless idea of “Islamic Art.”

This discourse on the history of fiqh is based on two concepts—ijtihad and taqlid—without going into historicity and theoretical debates. Disciplinary debate was about whether jurists in a particular period carried out ijtihad or practiced taqlid, reading the all of legal history through these two terms. The second problem was reading the history of fiqh as a linear narrative, originating in Makkah and Madinah moving on to Damascus, then Baghdad, and on to the present day. This reading disregards a multi-polar legal tradition of complex scholarship that has changed throughout Islamic history, in addition to its associated regional histories. The third problem is the failure to look at the social and other contexts in which of theories and opinions came to be held, how deliberations and debates played out within a particular tradition. Prof. Taskomur reminded the audience that Islamic law did not follow a single linear story line. Historical studies on specific topics such as women or economics have tended to move abruptly from Abu Hanifa’s views to those of twentieth century jurists on the topic.

In the regional context, Taskomur described the problem of Ottoman republican historiography in which the history of law has been viewed as a dichotomy of the shari’ah as static, unchanging law vs. rationally grounded, secular qanun. Ottoman legal studies rely on qadi court documents, the most exploited sources for legal history, under the assumption that this body of source material represents law in practice, whereas fiqh material is regarded as a frozen and closed area. The historical approach regarding legal sources and fiqh of this period has suffered total disregard. Added to this is the notion that nothing changed, since this was claimed to be an age of decline. Taskomur noted that Prof. Kafadar had already mentioned the ethnicization of Ottoman law, Turkish law existing alongside Arab law, as though knowledge production of the fatwa were vernacular legal scholarship. Taskomur argued that the ethnic dimension of fiqh studies is a very marginal phenomenon.

He outlined his approach to the fiqh texts: asking questions about their authors and the social context, inquiring into the institutional and cultural framework in which this body of knowledge was produced and reproduced. From the early fourteenth to the late sixteenth centuries, there was an increase in the establishment of madrasas for legal training in the Ottoman context. From 1324-1580 CE in western Anatolia and the Balkans, more than 300 madrasas were newly established—an enormous number considering what previously existed in Anatolia, which does not include those established by the Mamluks. Along with this institutional boom, there was an increase in literacy in urban areas, which had direct bearing on the nature of legal discussions. Taskomur inquires into the Ottoman scholarly tradition, its ethos and ideals, also in disciplines of learning such as ilm al-balaga, logic, and the idea of scholarly verification of juristic proofs.

There was a spirit of competition for jobs and prestige in Islamic scholarly tradition, and an examination system was introduced for applicants to institutional positions, somewhat parallel to the Chinese civil examination system. An applicant was required to answer questions revealing his point of view on those matters. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this examination had become institutionalized.

There are a number of areas outside fiqh and qanun that developed as regional phenomena in the law, such as Ottoman engagement with Safavids and Europeans in maritime law, international law, and commercial law that developed during this period, with reference to Prof. Tezcan’s discussion of monetization and the market economy in the second empire.

Another notable feature was the public nature of the Ottoman legal discussion. Pamphleteering and the development of a new genre of the legal risale [letter] flourished in the sixteenth century, underlining the public nature of fiqh. These writings display several characteristics: They are argumentative; they cite multiple sources and utilize footnotes and references, and the texts were open to public scrutiny as opposed to being closed works for internal or courtly consumption only. Prof. Taskomur showed an example (see PPT in video) of another type of source for legal history, a treatise by Mehmet Effendi, from the sixteenth century, showing marginal notes by an anonymous reader. In sum, the faqih as a scholar is not one who imitates but one who verifies.

Hayrettin Yucesoy, St. Louis University

Husseyin Yilmaz, University of Florida

Stephen Dale, Ohio State University

Cengiz Sisman, Furman University

Hayrettin Yucesoy Presentation Summary

Prof. Yücesoy based his presentation on what he said is an extraordinarily important text by Ibn Taymiya. He discussed the fallacy of golden age and decline in reference to what is generally called Islamic political thought.

George Sabine’s History of Political Theory, and the Cambridge History of Political Thought, contain nothing about Islamic political thought, except for a brief treatment of it at the end of a volume dealing with the twentieth century. Such surveys may mention the subject in a chapter entitled something like “beyond Western political thought.” This is one problem in the discipline, and a related problem is the way in which specialists and generalists have dealt with Islamic political thought.

According to the received wisdom, Islamic political thought was divided into three distinct epistemic categories, only one of which was considered properly Islamic. One is political philosophy, advanced by philosophers who offered an exposition of politics under the subject of practical philosophy, which was considered to have been theoretical, short-lived, (for example, al-Farabi, d. 950, is considered as its last and greatest representative), and quite marginal. Another category is siyasa, which is secular government, which was elaborated by belles lettres and secretaries and included manuals of statecraft, mirrors of princes, and ethics. The received wisdom dismisses these two traditions as marginal or/and inauthentic. The third category is juristic or legal politics, which is dealt with in medieval Islamic history under the umbrella of the imama, which was mostly elaborated by jurists and theologians to promote the ideal religious form of government, and is viewed as the only properly Islamic genre of political thought.

The problem with the juristic theory, however, according to this view is two-fold: (a) Having allied themselves with the caliphate, and noticing the growing gap between ideals and reality, theologians and jurists gradually made concessions from the ideals until political thought was reduced to a bad copy of reality. As the caliphate declined, political thought followed suit. After the tenth century until the time when Western modernity altered its fate. In short, political thought had paralleled the rise and decline of Islam itself. (b) Islamic political thought consciously and continuously rejects rationality. It does not recognize reason as a foundation for political morality, but only as a branch of religious law which determines how political authority should be dispensed. As a result, according to this notion, Islamic political culture, and to a large extent political practice, lacks the notion of separation between religious authority and temporal power.

The task for the historian of political thought is therefore to dismantle this notion piece by piece to let new narratives emerge. The passage from Ibn Taymiya, taken from his treatise on public morality, treats the question of justification of state authority—why we need a state or government. By the standards of the conventional wisdom, Ibn Taymiya is considered a scholar of the period of decline, one of the inspirational forces of the modern Salafi movement, and one whose thought represents, in modern Islamist and Orientalist discourses, an attempt to bypass history, i.e. the decline period, in order to revive the thought and practice of the golden age. In this brief passage, however, Ibn Taymiya’s assumptions, reasoning, and argument do not fit the decline narrative. It is out of pace with the paradigmatic Sunni political epistemology about rationality, and it does not propose a break with either its present or its history. Prof. Yücesoy would therefore propose a footnote to Ibn Taymiya’s text, to illustrate how little sense the paradigm of golden age and decline makes in understanding so-called Islamic political thought.

Prof. Yücesoy began with a theoretical point. Using [Mikhail] Bakhtin’s dialogic strategy he has argued that the text in question seems to refract quite creatively the meaning of previous works of jurisprudence, theology, exegesis, philosophy, prophetic Hadith and wisdom literature all at once. On the one hand, it alludes to and grounds itself in these works, and on the other hand informs, enriches and re-deploys them for a new socio-political context as possible ways of thinking about and articulating political thought. Ibn Taymiya’s text can be read as an intra-discourse operating with and within other discourses to constitute a new type of political discourse appropriate for the post-Mongol world of politics. In order to introduce his own voice, Ibn Taymiya accentuates the notion of maslaha, defined broadly as the notion of welfare or social utility, precisely because it facilitates new ways to formulate rational arguments to justify rulership on the basis of the universal human condition. Secondly, it allows him to embrace various human experiences under a proper theoretical category. Thirdly, it enables him to expand jurisprudential and theological rationality to accommodate new methods of thought and arguments. Ibn Taymiya had to negotiate his thought with and within four competing but interrelated discourses which came to bear on political thought and which had complex histories of their own: (1) prophetic Hadith, (2) jurisprudential notion of ijmaa (consensus) (3) principle of welfare, maslaha, (4) the notion of human rationality, which will be discussed in the following.

First, the spread of Hadith literature and its integration into jurisprudential methodology underlined a major epistemological shift in Sunni thinking. Hadith became a textual representation of a remarkably privileged social and religious discourse maintained by Hadith transmitters, who, soon after they arise in the late 8th century, were able to establish it as one of the two major foundations of jurisprudential and theological thinking. The articulation of Sunnism and the formation of its fundamental principles were indebted in a major way to Hadith scholars as exemplified in the life of one of the most eminent jurists in Islamic history, al-Shafii (d. 820). Hadith became the second source in religious law after the Qur’an, in fact the prism through which one approached the Qur’an. The idea that the imamate was a religious necessity derived inspiration and strength from the prestige of traditions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad. The imamate is the religiously sanctioned political leadership, but is also used generally as “government” or “state.” A master theologian such as al-‘Ashari (d. 936) deployed newfound Sunni and Hadith pre-commitments (newfound because he was a Mutazilite and had a change of heart) and used Qur’anic verses, but especially Hadith reports to argue for the obligatory nature of the imamate. The Hadith-based argument for the necessity of the imamate became so prominent that it was cited as a major opinion in the ninth century, well beyond Sunni circles.

Once Hadith became a discursive practice defining where one stood in the religious and intellectual spectrum, jurists and theologians had to find a way to tackle the question of the imamate without discarding Hadith. Ibn Taymiya’s challenge was precisely how he would negotiate Hadith as a discourse without violating his basic religious and intellectual principles or loyalties. One way was to rely on jurisprudential rationality. Developed out of the need to deal with the issues of an increasingly complex society, legal rationality in Islamic jurisprudence which we call fiqh, presented scholars with the occasion to devise strategies that could clarify, limit, reject, or modify Hadith to address new questions. With it, it became possible to remember and revive older or alternative views that had been pushed to the margins because of their anomalies to the Hadith paradigm.

Relying on historical memory, jurists developed a major argument on the question of the imamate to engage Hadith, namely the notion of communal agreement, ijmaa. Ijmaa, or consensus , the idea that if the community agrees on a legal or theological issue, its consensus became a legally binding verdict, first appeared in the text of al-Shafi’I’s al-Risala, in which the imamate was presented as an obligation dictated by communal consensus. The idea of ijmaa gradually spread in jurisprudential and theological writings until it became a major justification for the necessity of the imamate among Sunni jurists and theologians in the tenth century. It seems that ijmaa played a dual role as a construct that reigned in Hadith-based assertion, floating around without a strict methodological structure, and perhaps more importantly, it opened the door to embrace and absorb community’s experience as a source of legitimacy. Ijmaa had its own limitations and had its critics, however. It was essentially a legal principle, it favored jurisprudential solutions for political questions, and it did not have wide applicability, since it became an abstract concept with limited value confined to a limited number of cases.

Additional constraints on both the Hadith and the ijmaa came from an elephant in the room. That is the legacy of imperial practices and ideologies in the Near East, which found talented supporters since the 7th century, and experienced a renaissance from the ninth century onward. Expressed and elaborated in treatises of advice to governors, caliphs and princes, this genre began largely with translating Sassanian imperial literature into Arabic as exemplified in the writings of Ibn al-Muqaffa in the 8th century. It gradually incorporated aspects of practical ethics, akhlaq, jurisprudence, and Greek political philosophy, forming an influential political ideology that amirs and sultans of the late Abbasid and post-Mongol periods aspired to emulate. Interested primarily in practical governance and the ways by which royal authority could be maintained, siyasa was a distinct discourse on government, therefore part of the struggle during and after the tenth century. From the perspective of the jurists, engaging siyasa did undermine their own basic principles.

The third discourse engaged by Ibn Taymiya was use of the principle of maslaha—welfare or social utility. Al-Juwayni (d. 1085) marks a major shift in political thinking with his introduction of the notion of maslaha into legal and theological reasoning. In general, maslaha denotes welfare and is used by theologians and jurists after al-Juwayni to mean the general good or the public interest. Anything which helps to avert injury and furthers human welfare is considered maslaha. The argument from maslaha about the origins of government is based on the premise that social life and leadership are necessary for human survival and betterment, and as such, rulership is needed merely to protect, arbitrate, administer, and in some cases to avoid chaos and self-destruction. Once al-Juwayni made the principle of welfare his overriding argument, he was able to make another leap to discuss polities other than the imamate. He acknowledged that forms of government other than the imamate are also legitimate as long as they ensure welfare, maintain social harmony and prevent chaos. Al-Juwayni’s maslaha was a very perceptive intervention, and his contemporaries and later generations of scholars engaged his views. Al-Juwayni’s student al Ghazali refined maslaha as a concept and argued more extensively and broadly than his teacher for its use in elaborating on social and political life.

Once the notion of public welfare became part of the vocabulary, especially in regard to politics other than the imamate, it brought to the fore additional semantic questions within its field. Was divine law universal? What was the status of societies customs and traditions without it? What was the role of reason in determining the value of things in the absence of revelation? It is not difficult to imagine that such questions brought jurists and theologians intellectually face to face with human nature and human societies at large, and presented them with a new opportunity to expand the conceptual “toolbox” of Sunni epistemology. This is where jurists and theologians engaged a crucial subject long discussed among philosophers. Why does humankind need coercive authority in the first place? Why should social organization be beneficial to humans? Initially, the subject was raised as a philosophical question among the philosophers, and later made its way into juristic and theological writings, becoming a major aspect of the discourse shortly after the emergence of the theory of welfare.

To Prof. Yücesoy’s knowledge, the first among the jurists and theologians to discuss this problem in some depth were al-Ghazali and his contemporary Raghib al-Isfahani. The argument is that humankind is civil by nature, in Arabic, “al-insan madaniyyun bi al-tab’.” This is familiar to us from the history of philosophy, but here it is something new among the jurists and theologians. Humans have a natural propensity to live in communities and therefore need to cooperate among themselves. From human cooperation results the familiar storyline of the birth of human communities and eventually the rise of cities and so forth. One must admit that this line of thought is very much different from an argument based simply on a tradition attributed to the Prophet asking the faithful to institute rulership or leadership.

Returning to Ibn Taymiya’s text, it is creatively linked to a web of discourses that the author is deliberately bringing to the foreground for discussion. The text is in fact a palimpsest containing layers of both the erased and the erasing, the absorbed and absorbing, and the transformed and transforming. It is an intricate transposition. Without its corresponding text, we would not be able to appreciate these points in depth, and would not realize the nuances of the other texts. Like his earlier colleague al-Ghazali, Ibn Taymiya thought about the question of reform and revival, and was bold enough to challenge categories, beginning with his own Hanbali background. It is instructive to see how a younger contemporary of his-- the Asharite al-Iji and still younger scholar Spanish Maliki scholar al-Shatibi expanded on his ideas.

So the relevant question, in conclusion, is far from asking how we come from point A to point B in terms of decline or progress. The real task is to reconstruct a spiderweb that the passage time, and we as scholars, have disturbed, so that we can re-imagine individuals and societies in their complex connectedness.

Citations:

Ahmad b. ‘Abd al-HalÄ«m b. Taymiyya, Public Duties in Islam: The Institution of the Hisba, Tr. Mukhtar Holland (Leicester, UK: Islamic Foundation, 1982), pp. 20-22 (with modification).

Sabine, George. A history of political theory. 3rd ed. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1961.

Burns, J. The Cambridge history of political thought, 1450-1700. Cambridge ;;New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Husseyin Yilmaz Presentation Summary

One of the areas that the decline paradigm does not problematize is how the Islamic tradition was inherited and adopted by later cultural entities. In that context Prof. Yılmaz discussed how the Ottomans were exposed to the broader Islamic tradition, how they adopted it, and how they produced different manifestations of Islam. He focused on the area of language.

When the Ottomans appeared around the late thirteenth, they were linguistically different from the surrounding cultural context, so they were not fully capable of absorbing the broader Islamic tradition despite their exposure. They were Islamically much less educated than the broader Arab and Persian constituency, and because they were expanding towards non-Muslim territories, they had historically very little exposure to traditional Islamic institutions of learning. That led to a very different kind of development from that of other Islamic historical periods. One tendency among the proponents of conventional decline paradigm is to look for great figures in the Ottoman Empire who are comparable to such medieval figures as al-Mawardi and al-Farabi. We don’t find such figures because the Ottomans had a very different historical experience in their exposure to and adaptation of Islam.

Prof. Yılmaz began with an early sixteenth century passage from a translation regarding contemporary perceptions of Arabic tradition and Turkish, which helps illustrate how Turkish became an important medium for conveying the broader Islamic tradition into the Ottoman context. Aksarayi, in his translation of Imad al-Islam, stated:

“Do not take this book lightly just because it is in Turkish, for it contains thorough knowledge and practice. Every people have their own language and people cannot benefit from other languages. Had Prophet Muhammad been here, he would have spoken Turkish, because he could only address people in this way. The Qur’an indicates that messengers were sent to people in their own languages. We know that the Prophet said, “learning in a duty for every male and female Muslim.” But this does not mean that they have to learn it in Arabic from a teacher, nor it means that the duty is unfulfilled if one does not study it in Arabic. Know that the ultimate objective is to acquire knowledge regardless of the way one may pursue to achieve it. It makes no difference whether one learns it through studying Arabic with an instructor, by hearing from a scholar, or by reading books in Turkish. Although I put a Turkish garment on this book, its meaning is revealed Arabic. Because God revealed knowledge in Arabic, Arab scholars explained it in Arabic for the benefit of their people. Then, when knowledge passed to Persia, Persian scholars continued to write scholarly works in Arabic. But for the common folks, they wrote in Persian, because common folks could only benefit from it in Persian. When the knowledge passed to the land of Turks, Rumeli, the scholars of the Rum continued to write only in Arabic, and knowledge remained as a buried treasure for the common people. Therefore just as the muftis of our time issue their legal opinions in Turkish, I reveal this treasure which was buried under Arabic and Persian to the common people despite the false assumptions of the jealous.”

There are a number of important insights in this short passage, such as the insight about being able to write in Turkish instead of Arabic or Persian. It further points to the tension between Islamic universalism vs. vernacular identities. But, more importantly, it shows that by the mid-sixteenth century, Turkish had become the language of literary culture in the Ottoman Empire, a process that has been little questioned in scholarship. The fact that this cultural formation could not simply be taken for granted is the starting point of my inquiry. In the other two empires discussed in this forum, Turkish did not become the primary language of literary culture, despite the fact that both the Mughal and Safavid Empires were ruled by Turkish dynasties. The Ottoman Empire was founded by speakers of Turkic languages as well so, demographically, Turkish could still have continued to be the language of oral communication. But as a medium of cultural and administrative articulation, it didn’t have to become a single, hegemonic language by the sixteenth century. This was the result of a peculiar historical process that was uneven, and that was prompted by specific historical developments.

The historical process by which Turkish became a literary language seems to have gained a noticeable momentum in the aftermath of the Battle of Ankara in 1402. The Ottoman defeat by the Timurids led to a moment of crisis that prompted a search for good government. During the ensuing interregnum, marked by a fierce succession struggle among competing princes, a number of important texts on good government were translated from Persian and Arabic.

At the time, Turkish was still not a literary language. First of all, the lack of orthography made writing in this language a daunting task for both authors and translators. Second, it was still a profane language; namely, it lacked even the most basic vocabulary to express Islamic views that was already ingrained in Turkish high and folk culture alike. In interlinear Qur’anic translations, for example, even the most popular of Islamic terms needed to be translated, such as God, Heaven, Hell, and prayer, a fact that may point to vernacular consciousness, but also demonstrates that the target audience for these translations were more comfortable in using the vocabulary of their indigenous religious tradition. Translating these basic Islamic terms into a profane language was quite a feat on the part of translators. But perhaps a more challenging problem was the lack of a readership for Turkish because the literate members of society were already educated in Persian or Arabic. As a result there was not yet a considerable reading audience for Turkish. Writing in Turkish was a sign of lacking both education and social status which could easily attach its user a lingering stigma.

Hoca Mes’ud in the early fourteenth century was one of those early adventurers in Turkish writing who declared his task a moral obligation: “I wrote in Turkish because it is more appropriate to speak to people in their own language, and people nowadays all speak Turkish.” But he was more blunt when he voiced the technical difficulties and social challenges he faced: “Turkish doesn’t fit the meter or rhythm. The language of the Turk is such a strange language. When I write in Turkish I was half mortified because of shame. I fear that someone will read it and belittle me for ignorance.” An anonymous contemporary of his couldn’t agree more: “My country is Turk, my language is Turk, I wrote Turkish because people speak Turkish. Turkish is not easy to read or write, it is not a known language. Turkish lacks suitable expressions; it is cold with no taste. Turkish is dry and rough like Turks. If you work on the form, you will lose the meaning. If you keep the meaning, you lose the form.” Many such early authors highlighted these difficulties and reflected their anxiety of being stigmatized as uncultured. In similar vein, a translator who humbly identified himself as not being a learned man told the dramatic story behind his undertaking. As he stated, he implored his brother, who was a well-regarded scholar, for years to write a book to educate the little learned folks on Islamic matters. His brother refused to write in Turkish because of this stigma, but ultimately agreed to write in Arabic. The author then translated it into Turkish, relieved his brother from that anxiety and took the risk upon himself.

Those early writers deployed a number of reasons to justify their use of Turkish. One was the Qur’anic precedent that prophets addressed their people in their own languages. Considering themselves as vicegerents of prophets, they justified writing in Turkish as taking up the same mission. The translators also attributed an instrumental value to language, careful not to undermine Arabic’s status, and pointed to the meaning rather than the language itself as the ultimate goal. In that regard, many fifteenth century authors also claimed to have conveyed the same meaning in Turkish as in Arabic, despite the fact that this claim may not have been taken very seriously by their contemporaries. GülÅŸehri, for example, claimed that he created a better work than the Persian original. Some translators were motivated by piety, taking on the obligation to educate the masses who were mostly illiterate, Turkish-speaking, and uneducated in Islamic matters. More significantly, using Turkish was particularly prompted by a marked demand on the part of uneducated rulers themselves, who commissioned the translation of books not only for their broader constituencies but for their own use. In this way, medical and political works were translated for the use of the courts and masses.

An important story from around the thirteenth century indicates the level of education among these early rulers. It was conveyed by a sixteenth century Ottoman source, but is quite telling for the broader western Anatolia at this time. A GermiyanoÄŸlu ruler, neighboring the Ottomans at the frontier was reported to have enjoyed poetry and kept a number of poets at his court. One poet, Åžeyhi, was a very respected poet and often presented the ruler with very elaborate poems. But the ruler had difficulty in understanding his poetry. In one of his courtly gatherings an unknown poet took up the word in Turkish and said, “My illustrious Sultan. I wish you well, may you eat honey and cream, and walk on fine grass.” Upon hearing this words which were not more a rhymed praise, the sultan said: “That is the kind of poetry I want to hear. It is pure Turkish, it is simple, it has no mystical value”. He rewarded the poetaster by promoting him to his chief court poet and dismissed the others. One of those dismissed poets is said to have died from grief at the degradation of culture.

Such little educated rulers seemed to have been more and more interested in Turkish. These rulers also seemed to have developed interest in Turkish as a propaganda medium for noting that Turkish texts had a broader chance of reaching to common folks who could not read Persian or Arabic but could only comprehend when read in Turkish. These translated texts were often prefaced by long panegyrics about the ruler. Ottoman rulers capitalized on this tradition, sponsoring and commissioning the translation of a number of books that circulated widely. In that regard, Murad II seems to have seized the moment; during his reign of 30 years he commissioned the translation of over 30 books into Turkish. Most of these were very well-read, popular books in medicine, poetry, and Islamic sciences. With few exceptions, all were also accompanied by panegyrics for the benefit of the Ottoman sultan.

With the gradual institutionalization of Ottoman education, Turkish also became the language of learning as well. In medreses and Sufi convents where lectures were based on text-reading, translation became same as teaching. Textbooks were kept in original languages, whether Persian in the Sufi convents, or Arabic in Ottoman medreses but got translated and commented upon when taught. Ottoman learned men still continued to write in Arabic, especially in the Islamic sciences, and most Ottoman Sufis kept writing in Persian. However, the medium to teach these texts increasingly became Turkish, and the number of copies with marginal explanatory notes increased drastically. As a result, the very teaching activity came to be dominated by Turkish. Overall, by the sixteenth century, more than 200 titles had been translated into Turkish from Arabic and Persian. In the meantime, translation gained a much broader meaning than a mere rendering a text from one language to another. Thanks to this unprecedented translation activity of the previous two centuries Turkish became firmly established as the primary language of Ottoman culture and administration by the sixteenth century. As such, it became a language capable of expressing even the most complicated concepts and ideas in the Arabic and Persian tradition. The anxiety in writing Turkish diminished. To the contrary, there was an anti-translation movement in the sixteenth century in which a group of poets who boasted to have been inventors, belittled and criticized poets and scholars who translated from Arabic and Persian, or who used poetic motifs from Persian in their Turkish poetry. Such a reaction points to the formation of a very different cultural identity. Re-capping this historical process, Prof. Yılmaz showed how, Turkish itself, not Arabic or Persian, became the main vehicle for conveying the broader Islamic tradition into the Ottoman context.

Stephen Dale Presentation Summary

Prof. Dale discussed commonalties among the three empires or states. Before beginning, he issued a few cautions on how historians talk about these commonalities. The first is the question of multiple identities of individuals. Dale cited the example of Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire. In the Babur-Nama, he talked about his father, Shaykh Mirza, who in a very telling passage, described how his father would wear a Mongol cap when he was sitting around with his Turco-Mongol buddies drinking or doing other things. In the same passage, he said that when his father held court in the Ferghana Valley, that he would then put on the turban. This passage describes on one hand Babur’s father’s Turco-Mongol identity, which was a social and military identity, and his religious identity as a Muslim. When he sat at court, he was acting as a Muslim sultan. When he sat with his Turco-Mongol colleagues, drinking as they often did, he was acting as a Turco-Mongol warrior. It is worth keeping in mind that individuals in these empires could and did shift across different identities, depending on the context in which they were operating at a given time.

A further illustration of this in a political theory sense is a work by the fourteenth century Indo-Muslim historian Birani who is a kind of Indian equivalent of Mustafa Ali, someone who has been thrown out of work and is complaining about the situation. Birani, in a political theory work, talks about the problems of the Delhi Sultans, that they don’t govern like Muslim rulers. Here is this massive country, he says, where most of the people are still Hindus. In the streets of Delhi are Hindu bankers, Hindu merchants, Hindu rulers of one kind or another, sometimes with Muslim servants running in front of them to clear out the crowds. He complains that this is terrible: here is a ruler who is Muslim but he’s not ruling over a Muslim state. But then in the same treatise, Birani says, “Well, how can one rule a country like India?” He said that the way to govern such a country is to rule like a Persian emperor. So here again are the different identities of someone who is Muslim, technically in a Muslim state, patronizing Muslim institutions, decrying the problems but at the same time saying the ruler must rule it like the old-fashioned, pre-Islamic Persian empire. Inhabiting these different, seemingly contradictory identities at the upper levels of society in such Muslim states, or Muslim empires as the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughals may be a common characteristic.

Prof. Dale spoke about these three states as sharing a common civilization or common culture within a larger Islamic civilization. Here he is thinking about the way anthropologists talk about cultures and civilizations. Many in the audience may be familiar with the standard work by American anthropologists A. L. Kroeber & Clyde Kluckhohn, Understanding Culture in which they define the essence of civilization and culture as a distinction in values from one culture or civilization to another. This kind of thing is apparent in al-Biruni’s work on India. When he entered India he was shocked by what he saw, and revealed the distinctions in the values of a person moving from a Greco-Islamic Central Asian context into a Hindu South Asian context. His shock at the culture he encountered was really palpable.

On the other hand, these three empires are usually considered separately. For example, the late John Richards was a scholar of the Mughal Empire who hardly discussed anything outside of it at all. In general, students of Ottoman Turkish at Ohio State University hardly take any courses outside of Ottoman history. The same is true of students who work on the Safavids. There is an extraordinary isolation among the students and scholars of these fields, despite the lack of any justification for it. In fact, the opposite is true—these three empires form a cultural sphere in the same sense that Europe forms a cultural sphere. While there are no doubt great differences among these empires in terms of the territories they conquered, their religious attitudes—particularly in the Shi’i and Sunni divide—but at least at the level of the dynasty, the military aristocracy, the bureaucracy and the literati, there is a common civilization. These three empires are common legatees of political, religious, literary, artistic, and philosophical traditions which are very striking commonalties in all three of these empires or states. At the same time, merchants, poets, religious vagabonds, philosophers, and military advisors circulated freely, constantly crossing the borders of these territories. Particularly in the case of Iran and India such movement occurred, and in the Ottoman case, military advisors of their time turned up at Babur’s Battle of Panipat in 1526, in India. His Ottoman military advisors organized the military based on Ottoman models.

Prof. Dale discussed the categories into which these empires or states fit. First, they were all Turco-Mongol states to one degree or another. In the case of the Mughals, they were Turco-Mongols whose lineage was impossible not to envy—descended both from Genghis Khan on this mother’s side, and Timur on his father’s side. In the case of the Safavids this factor was more muted, but still related to the Turkic White Sheep and the Black Sheep dynasties, in northwestern and western Iran, in the matrilineal sense. Shah Ismail was a Turk, and of course he spoke a Turkic language and wrote his poetry in what might be regarded as an old-fashioned version of Azeri Turkish, while the Ottoman Selim was writing poetry in Persian. In the Ottoman case, Prof. Yilmaz just spoke about the development of the Turkish language the Ottomans spoke, an Oguz Turkish which eventually became the spoken and written language of the Ottoman Empire. Some poets complained about borrowing from the Persian, and encouraged the Ottomans to improve their literary language and stop borrowing from Persian.

In terms of the political and military heritage, they were Turco-Mongol states. Their sense of their Turkic origins was particularly strong in the Mughal and the Ottoman case. The Mughals were still sending money back to Samarkand until they fell apart in the early part of the eighteenth century. The Ottomans at various times in their history became more or less concerned with their Oguz ancestors or presumptive ancestors in Central Asia. There was much less of this shared Turco-Mongol heritage in the Safavid case, in which religious identity became more important than racial or linguistic identity in their heritage.

In terms of the language, it is also interesting that all of these Mughals spoke a Turkic language. Babur wrote his memoirs in Chagatai Turkish; among the Safavids, Shah Ismail wrote his poetry in Azeri Turkish, and Turkish was used in the Ottoman Empire. In the case of the Mughals, by the seventeenth century, Turkish had evaporated as a written language, but it was still spoken by some members of the dynasty. Jahangir, when he went to Kabul in the early seventeenth century, specifically congratulated himself for being able to read Babur’s memoirs while he was in Kabul revisiting his ancestors’ homeland. In the Safavid case, Turkish was spoken at the court of Shah Abbas and even at the court of the Qajars in the nineteenth century; their Turkish identity continued. To some extent, the sub-culture of Azeri Turkish continues to the present day, but only in the Ottoman Empire did Turkish become the dominant literary and cultural language of the empire.

Another striking feature of the shared political heritage was the fact that all of these dynasties shared the same problems of succession following the death of a ruler. The idea of shared sovereignty was a characteristic of tribes in general, but particularly of Turco-Mongol tribes in Central Asia. Preference was often given to the eldest son, but that didn’t guarantee that the eldest son would inherit the throne. In the Ottoman case and in the Safavid case the problem was “solved” if we can think of it in those terms, by immersion of the successors in the harem. Whether or not one could call it a “solution” from the point of view of the heirs, there was the scene of coffins coming out of the Topkapi Palace, but it was certainly a solution from the point of view of the ruling dynasty. In the Mughal case, there was never a serious attempt to change the system which led to a civil war upon the death or illness of each ruler. This Turco-Mongol inheritance pattern continued to the end of the dynasty. It is possible to look upon this and consider it an advantage to the dynasty because the most capable military leader would rise to the top, and perhaps that was true in several cases, but it probably wasn’t true in the eighteenth century. In all of these empires there was this same political inheritance.

In all three of these dynasties there was reverence for the Timurids of Herat. All three of these dynasties looked back at Herat as the ideal of Turkic literary and artistic culture. Mustafa Ali wrote about this in his history. The Safavids tried to generate a phony connection with Timur, and Babur and his descendants looked upon Herat as the high point of Timurid culture, before the Timurid Renaissance in South Asia. In the case of the Ottomans and Safavids, there was what might be called “lineage envy,” or the attempt to formulate a lineage which would provide the advantages of descent that the Mughals had, relating both to Timur and Genghis Khan as Central Asian lineages. In terms of political inheritance, the three shared aspects of the Sassanian legacy of the concept of the just sultan, and the political tradition of the Sassanians was present at all of these courts and dynasties to one degree or another.

The most obvious continuity or similarity among these empires are the literary and philosophical links. The literary links alluded to by the panelists at this Forum are extraordinarily strong. Persian literature dominated and became the model for the literary tradition both in Mughal India and in the Ottoman Empire. Even after the Ottomans shifted to writing poetry in Turkish, much of this poetry consisted of a string of Persian words ending with a Turkic verb. Even after Turkish became more important, the dominance of Persian literary models was quite striking.

Secondly, in terms of a point raised by Rajeev Kinra about the Sabk-i Hindi and the evolution of literary tradition, Prof. Dale noted that it has been discussed as early as the first decades of the twentieth century. An Indo-Muslim literary historian talked about this in the early 1920s. He mentioned wading through an entire Persian text on Sabk-i Hindi, which in some Ottoman literary sources was also referred to in the sense of literary changes in the tradition. The common literary inheritance and the common literary changes are another common feature in all three empires.

Thirdly, there was a common artistic tradition on which all three drew. The miniature painting was primarily a tradition originating in Iran and moving to India, or perhaps it came out of Timurid Iranian culture and the Timurid state, moved to India, then was adopted by court painters in the Ottoman Empire. No doubt there were changes in subjects and techniques in the different regions, just as there were changes and variations in the cultural expressions of European states, to recall the parallel made earlier in this presentation, which reflect a common literary inheritance from the Romans. Many of the illustrated manuscripts and in India as well as in the Ottoman empire were texts chosen for illustration were often based on Iranian literary models, notwithstanding differing traditions.

Finally, to end with a point related to political theory, there is the common philosophical inheritance of all these states. It is striking in all of these empires that they all accepted Aristotle as the First Teacher, and with it Neo-Platonic philosophy. The philosophical tradition that becomes so important in Isfahan and Shiraz in the seventeenth century is that heritage, and has tremendous influence in India. It really dominates some of the philosophical developments of the seventeenth century.

One other point is the cross-cutting influence of some of the Sufi movements, particularly the Naqshbandi order. Ahmed Sirhindi, the famous Naqshbandi shaikh in India, had a teacher who was a member of the Khawajah group in Central Asia. He came to India and gave instruction in the Naqshbandi tradition. Sirhindi referred to himself as the Mujadid [reformer] of this tradition, which was transmitted back into the Middle East in Kurdish areas and eventually, in the case of the early twentieth century, was influential as one of the most important Ottoman religious figures of the early twentieth century.

Keeping all of these commonalties in mind, Prof. Dale cited an important difference among these empires in connection with the presentations of the forum. In relation to the rise and decline of empires, the influence of Ibn Khaldun is striking. Only among Ottoman intellectuals was Ibn Khaldun considered seriously and discussed at length. That was because the Ottomans were conscious of what Ibn Khaldun said about the rise and fall of dynasties, and they worried that his work was a predictive model for themselves, and so they voiced these concerns. There does not seem to have been a parallel influence in the case of the Safavids or the Mughals, where there was no such tradition of decline literature, certainly at the political level, that there was among intellectuals of the Ottoman Empire. So, emphasizing the similarities among the three empires, this is one major difference, namely the discussion of the rise and fall of empires itself. This discourse was personified in the figure of Ibn Khaldun. In turn, in relation to al-Ghazali and the concept of society and social groups, reading Ibn Khaldun makes it clear that the source for that idea in al-Ghazali is in fact Aristotle, bringing us back to the shared philosophical heritage of the three empires.

Cengiz Sisman Presentation Summary

One of the major sub-fields of the “golden age” and “decline” paradigm is the treatment of non-Muslims in Muslim societies. Prof. Sisman stated the importance of the topic of non-Muslims in this forum, and mentioned that while there have been significant revisions and paradigm shifts in studies on “non-Muslims under Islam” on the intellectual level in the field Islamic history, this paradigm shift has not necessarily taken effect in popular or public policy levels. Prof. Sisman, through mainly addressing the status of Jews and Christians in the Ottoman Empire, visited the question of “golden age” and “decline” paradigms, and proposed a new model, called “semi-autonomous millet-system” to understand the ottoman method of managing the diversity. His presentation had three main objectives: (1) the issue of decline with a particular reference to the Ottoman Jews; (2) the necessity of replacing the famous so-called “millet system” model in examining the Ottoman non-Muslims; and (3) deriving lessons from the multi-religious and multi-ethnic Ottoman experience for the contemporary societies and transferring this intellectual knowledge into public knowledge.

Prof. Sisman began by exploring the decline paradigm and expressions of it in the Ottoman Jewish context. The declinist thesis tended to view the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through the binary oppositions of purity and corruption. This model implied that only two legal situations were possible for non-Muslims: thick enforcement or lax disregard of the restrictions mandated by Islamic law. For a long period, historiography on the status of the non-Muslims in the Muslim empires was inspired by this dichotomy. According to this model, the non-Muslims, particularly Jews, Christians, and Hindus, lived in relative peace and harmony during the Golden Age, but with the introduction of orthodoxy and the puritanical and enthusiastic tendency in Islam, they then experienced exclusion, oppression, and even persecution. In the present context Sisman referred to the golden age as the reign of Suleyman the Magnificent in Ottoman times, Abbas the Great in Safavid Times, and Akbar the Great in the Mughal times. By the introduction of the orthodoxy, on the other hand, he referred to the Kadizadeli in Ottoman times, and Majlisi in Safavid times, and Aurangzeb in the Mughal times.

Examining the Jewish case in the Ottoman Empire is quite instructive in showing how this golden age and decline works in modern scholarship. Jews occupied important if not unique positions within the Ottoman socio-political and economic order. They were contractors, purveyors, private bankers, political advisors and physicians for the Ottoman court and other court matters; they made significant contributions to the Ottoman society in science, technology, culture and entertainment. They were one of the largest and most important non-Muslim communities in the Ottoman Empire.

Influenced by the Ottoman declinist argument, Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis claimed that the conditions of Ottoman Jews started to deteriorate in the seventeenth century due to the fact that immigration of Iberian Jewry was coming to a halt, economic opportunities within the Ottoman Empire were diminishing, and competition with the Christians was increasing. The declinist approach also assumes, then, that the Sabbataian movement (1665-1666) had a major destructive impact on already declining Jewish communities. In other words Sabbataianism , one of the largest if not the largest and most important Jewish messianic movements, did occur in the Ottoman empire, and its repercussions were felt not only within Ottoman territory but in all of the Jewish communities across borders in Europe, Russia, and other eastern communities. According to this argument, the Sabbataianmovement had a major destructive impact on these communities, accelerating their decline in two ways: (1) it is said to have undermined the Jewish position within the Ottoman system, since they lost their credibility in the eyes of the Ottomans; (2) it is said to have contributed to an unprecedented reinforcement of rabbinical power which was viewed as an obstacle to possible progressive development in subsequent centuries, including the nineteenth century.

Prof. Sisman stated that his study of Ottoman court and archival sources, as well as Jewish and European sources, forced him to revise this assumption. Along with the problems with the general Ottoman decline paradigm itself, the decline of the Ottoman Jewry has been the subject of misinterpretation and misrepresentation. For example, a longitudinal study of court record of Haskoy, which hasbeen one of the largest Jewish communities in Istanbul, showed that there was no dramatic change in the material or intellectual life of Jews in the first and second half of the seventeenth century and also the early eighteenth century. It is true that the Jews lost some of their privileged positions to the Greeks and Armenians in the seventeenth century in comparison to their privileged positions in the sixteenth century, but the pace & degree of so-called decline of the Ottoman Jews was greatly exaggerated by Jewish historians, who concentrated mainly on Jewish society or Jewish communities in Europe. Although it may be true that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were on the whole characterized by economic and spiritual impoverishment, that process was slow and was interspersed with periods of stability and even prosperity, as in the case of Izmir Jewish community.

During the second quarter of the seventeenth century, one Rabbi Benvenista referred to the sultan as the “merciful king” and stated that the tax burden was not so heavy as that which the Jews had to suffer under Christianity. , At the turn of the eighteenth century Lady Montague, an English observer of the Ottoman empire, with some exaggeration obviously, described the role of the Jews in the Ottoman Empire as follows: “I observed that most of the rich tradesmen were Jews. That people are an incredible power in this empire. They have many privileges, above the natural Turks themselves, and have formed a very considerable commonwealth here. They are judged by their own laws, and have drawn the whole trade of empire into their hands, partly by the firm union among themselves. They are the physicians, the stewards, and the interpreters of all the great men in the empire.” This passage is not a lone example coming from the literary resources and reports in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which again shows that there was not a real, or dramatic decline in the eighteenth century with regard to the status of the Jews.

Similar observations could be made about the social and economic developments of the Christian communities in the Ottoman empire. They, too, did not have one general and seamless “golden age” or “decline” experience. To the contrary, they did have different experiences in different part of the empire. For example, examining Christian communities of seventeenth and eighteenth century in Greece, Socrates Petmezas demonstrates that those communities enjoyed high levels of autonomy and economic prosperity in the eighteenth century. The rise of Phanariots, members of prominent Greek families in the Ottoman economy and diplomacy could be another example to challenge the assumption of continuous decline of the Ottoman non-Muslims. There were obviously counter-examples, indicating the impoverishment of the non-Muslims in different regions, but still examples and counter-examples challenge the overgeneralized assumptions of the declinist paradigm.

Prof. Sisman’s second focus was a review of the so-called “millet system” and to propose a new model or new concept by which to re-conceptualize the status of non-Muslims within the Ottoman Empire. Millet literally means “religion” in the Ottoman context. Without resorting to oversimplification, following the tradition of previous Islamic governance practices, the Ottomans considered Jews and Christians as People of the Book, or dhimma, the protected subject. The mechanism was simple: if a group wished to keep their religion, they had to pay a poll tax which was called a jizya, and in return for paying this special tax, Jews and Christians were allowed to practice their religion, and their lives and properties were under the protection of the state law. This law was inspired mostly by Islamic law.

It was generally believed that following the conquest of Istanbul or Constantinople in 1453, Mehmet II established a separate, parallel and autonomous organization for the Orthodox, Armenian, and Jewish subjects. These were supposedly homogeneous, empire-wide structures with well-defined borders and hierarchies, controlled by Istanbul through their ecclesiastical leaders, the Greek and Armenian patriarch and the Jewish chief rabbi. This so-called millet system, was a well-organized, well-regulated government of the minorities. Writing in the 1950s, Gibb and Bowen, in their book, Islamic Society and the West: A Study of the Impact of Western Civilization on Moslem Culture in the Near East consolidated the image of a timeless, fixed, unchanging “millet-system.” Arguing against this point, and writing in the 1980s, Benjamin Braudel claimed that the existence of the “millet-system” was a myth, and that it dated to the post-Tanzimat period of the nineteenth century, and had been super-imposed on the previous centuries. Yes, Braudel agreed, Mehmet II, had an ambition to create a centralized system by which he would control the non-Muslim subjects, but this system declined and did not work in the subsequent centuries. Since the 1980s, scholarship on the subject oscillated between two poles, claiming the existence or non-existence of the “millet-system.” Most of the time, historians either studied the Ottoman side of the story or the communal side of the story and concluded that there was a longitudinal autonomous “millet-system” or lack thereof. Without necessarily resorting to all available sources on both sides, they either studied internal life of the communities, or the formal Ottoman structures that linked them to the state.

The conviction about communal autonomy has encouraged the study of Jewish and Christian communities as self-contained entities having no interaction or relations with the communities of other confessions. Since this conference is also about re-conceptualization or re-framing of some of our old concepts and vocabularies, Sisman stated, he wanted to suggest a new concept for understanding inter-confessional diversity management in the Ottoman Empire. Sisman proposed that “semi-autonomous millet system” would better explain the phenomenon between the time of Mehmet II (1450s) up to the 1850s in the Ottoman Empire. He stated that there are three essential characteristics to this so-called millet system: internal autonomy of religious communities; their hierarchically and centrally organized empire-wide structures; and Ottoman recognition of those systems. It is true that pre-nineteenth century non-Muslim communities did not have these three characteristics all at the same time in a full fledge manner, but traces of these characteristics were there for sure. For example, they did have autonomy in their religious and economic affairs. And it seems that they were also hierarchically organized, though not empire-wide. Rather, smaller or medium-sized communities accepted the authority of religious and lay leadership of nearby larger ones, and in return received spiritual and material help from them. Naturally, being the spiritual and communal center, Istanbul was the highest religious authority for the Jewish and Christian communities.

Centralized collection of taxes was another factor contributing to the foundation of congregational and communal unity. One example would illustrate how this semi-autonomous, hierarchically organized communal structure was working in the Ottoman empire.. Again, the case of the Sabbataian movement, that mentioned earlier, is a very constructive example to show the hierarchy and autonomy and also the connectedness of those communities in the empire. , During the movement, which emerged in Jerusalem, then moved into Izmir, Istanbul and Edirne, Istanbul Jewry played an important role in shaping its trajectory.. The chief rabbi of Istanbulsent letters to other Jewish communities,, trying to control the Sabbataian activities in Jewish communities of Cairo,Jerusalem, Aleppo, Izmir and the Balkans. Feeling himself probably more responsible before the Ottoman authorities, the chief rabbi from Istanbul sent a letter to the sultan, thanking him that he had ended the “Sabbataian madness” , and thereby saved Ottoman Jewry from a malady.

Similar examples coming from the Jewish and Christian communities indicate that there was a considerable amount of autonomy, and a communal leadership headed by Istanbul even before the nineteenth century. These autonomies were controlled by the Ottoman authorities through taxation and through approval of the communal leadership, meaning that non-Muslims elect their leader internally, but the leaders had to be approved—not chosen—by the Ottoman authorities. By providing alternative courts for the members of other non Muslim communities, the Ottomans set in place a system of checks and balances, in the tendencies followed by non-Muslim communities. It is important to remember, however, that the borders between the faiths and the communities were fluid enough that individual agencies could always transcend those borders, thanks to social mobility. The most prominent road to social mobility was conversion, but even without conversion, members of the non-Muslim communities could move along these borders and attain social mobility.

This semi-autonomous millet system turned into a millet-system by the second half of the nineteenth century when Muslims and non-Muslims became equal citizens before the law. This major shift in long established Islamic practice of taxation and population taxsonomy became possible through the efforts of reform-minded Ottoman intellectuals and bureaucrats. Inspired by the ideals of French Revolution, these intellectuals wanted to create somewhat an egalitarian society, despite resistances originated from the traditional segments of Muslim and non-Muslim communities. Jizya was replaced by a practice of buying off military service on the part of the non-Muslims. Non-Muslim communities were recognized as corporate units with a degree of internal autonomy that regulated personal status, ritual issues, and finances according to their religious law and custom, with state support for their communal authorities.

By way of conclusion, Prof. Sisman made reference to public policy discussions. The Ottoman empire held together a remarkably broad mix of people—ethnic and religious groups—in a relatively peaceful and stable co-existence. Non-Muslim millets, or non-Sunnis in the Ottoman case, were legally subordinate to Muslims. Still, it is very hard to imagine that Ottomans maintained this system with the sheer force of naked power. They needed to have a measure of legitimacy to do that. How did the Ottomans maintain or manage this diversity over many centuries? ? This is one of the major questions that are waiting to be tackled by scholars thoroughly. Examining the Ottoman case help us to understand the working mechanisms of , a multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, multi-religious community.

Examining the Ottoman case also provides with an instructive example for contemporary believing Muslim individuals and states , which could derive lessons from the the Ottoman reformist intellectuals, legalists, and bureaucrats who struggled with contemporary issues, such asequality of Muslims and non-Muslims, nationalism, citizenship, and authority, and resolved them within the parameters of Islamic legal and political traditions There is also a lesson for other decision makers who are trying to create harmonious societies in an age when religion is still of paramount importance to people, and they again need to come up with better or more refined solutions other than the nation and secular states would suggest.

Hayrettin Yucesoy, St. Louis University

Husseyin Yilmaz, University of Florida

Stephen Dale, Ohio State University

Cengiz Sisman, Furman University

Hayrettin Yucesoy Presentation Summary

Prof. Yücesoy based his presentation on what he said is an extraordinarily important text by Ibn Taymiya. He discussed the fallacy of golden age and decline in reference to what is generally called Islamic political thought.

George Sabine’s History of Political Theory, and the Cambridge History of Political Thought, contain nothing about Islamic political thought, except for a brief treatment of it at the end of a volume dealing with the twentieth century. Such surveys may mention the subject in a chapter entitled something like “beyond Western political thought.” This is one problem in the discipline, and a related problem is the way in which specialists and generalists have dealt with Islamic political thought.

According to the received wisdom, Islamic political thought was divided into three distinct epistemic categories, only one of which was considered properly Islamic. One is political philosophy, advanced by philosophers who offered an exposition of politics under the subject of practical philosophy, which was considered to have been theoretical, short-lived, (for example, al-Farabi, d. 950, is considered as its last and greatest representative), and quite marginal. Another category is siyasa, which is secular government, which was elaborated by belles lettres and secretaries and included manuals of statecraft, mirrors of princes, and ethics. The received wisdom dismisses these two traditions as marginal or/and inauthentic. The third category is juristic or legal politics, which is dealt with in medieval Islamic history under the umbrella of the imama, which was mostly elaborated by jurists and theologians to promote the ideal religious form of government, and is viewed as the only properly Islamic genre of political thought.

The problem with the juristic theory, however, according to this view is two-fold: (a) Having allied themselves with the caliphate, and noticing the growing gap between ideals and reality, theologians and jurists gradually made concessions from the ideals until political thought was reduced to a bad copy of reality. As the caliphate declined, political thought followed suit. After the tenth century until the time when Western modernity altered its fate. In short, political thought had paralleled the rise and decline of Islam itself. (b) Islamic political thought consciously and continuously rejects rationality. It does not recognize reason as a foundation for political morality, but only as a branch of religious law which determines how political authority should be dispensed. As a result, according to this notion, Islamic political culture, and to a large extent political practice, lacks the notion of separation between religious authority and temporal power.

The task for the historian of political thought is therefore to dismantle this notion piece by piece to let new narratives emerge. The passage from Ibn Taymiya, taken from his treatise on public morality, treats the question of justification of state authority—why we need a state or government. By the standards of the conventional wisdom, Ibn Taymiya is considered a scholar of the period of decline, one of the inspirational forces of the modern Salafi movement, and one whose thought represents, in modern Islamist and Orientalist discourses, an attempt to bypass history, i.e. the decline period, in order to revive the thought and practice of the golden age. In this brief passage, however, Ibn Taymiya’s assumptions, reasoning, and argument do not fit the decline narrative. It is out of pace with the paradigmatic Sunni political epistemology about rationality, and it does not propose a break with either its present or its history. Prof. Yücesoy would therefore propose a footnote to Ibn Taymiya’s text, to illustrate how little sense the paradigm of golden age and decline makes in understanding so-called Islamic political thought.

Prof. Yücesoy began with a theoretical point. Using [Mikhail] Bakhtin’s dialogic strategy he has argued that the text in question seems to refract quite creatively the meaning of previous works of jurisprudence, theology, exegesis, philosophy, prophetic Hadith and wisdom literature all at once. On the one hand, it alludes to and grounds itself in these works, and on the other hand informs, enriches and re-deploys them for a new socio-political context as possible ways of thinking about and articulating political thought. Ibn Taymiya’s text can be read as an intra-discourse operating with and within other discourses to constitute a new type of political discourse appropriate for the post-Mongol world of politics. In order to introduce his own voice, Ibn Taymiya accentuates the notion of maslaha, defined broadly as the notion of welfare or social utility, precisely because it facilitates new ways to formulate rational arguments to justify rulership on the basis of the universal human condition. Secondly, it allows him to embrace various human experiences under a proper theoretical category. Thirdly, it enables him to expand jurisprudential and theological rationality to accommodate new methods of thought and arguments. Ibn Taymiya had to negotiate his thought with and within four competing but interrelated discourses which came to bear on political thought and which had complex histories of their own: (1) prophetic Hadith, (2) jurisprudential notion of ijmaa (consensus) (3) principle of welfare, maslaha, (4) the notion of human rationality, which will be discussed in the following.

First, the spread of Hadith literature and its integration into jurisprudential methodology underlined a major epistemological shift in Sunni thinking. Hadith became a textual representation of a remarkably privileged social and religious discourse maintained by Hadith transmitters, who, soon after they arise in the late 8th century, were able to establish it as one of the two major foundations of jurisprudential and theological thinking. The articulation of Sunnism and the formation of its fundamental principles were indebted in a major way to Hadith scholars as exemplified in the life of one of the most eminent jurists in Islamic history, al-Shafii (d. 820). Hadith became the second source in religious law after the Qur’an, in fact the prism through which one approached the Qur’an. The idea that the imamate was a religious necessity derived inspiration and strength from the prestige of traditions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad. The imamate is the religiously sanctioned political leadership, but is also used generally as “government” or “state.” A master theologian such as al-‘Ashari (d. 936) deployed newfound Sunni and Hadith pre-commitments (newfound because he was a Mutazilite and had a change of heart) and used Qur’anic verses, but especially Hadith reports to argue for the obligatory nature of the imamate. The Hadith-based argument for the necessity of the imamate became so prominent that it was cited as a major opinion in the ninth century, well beyond Sunni circles.

Once Hadith became a discursive practice defining where one stood in the religious and intellectual spectrum, jurists and theologians had to find a way to tackle the question of the imamate without discarding Hadith. Ibn Taymiya’s challenge was precisely how he would negotiate Hadith as a discourse without violating his basic religious and intellectual principles or loyalties. One way was to rely on jurisprudential rationality. Developed out of the need to deal with the issues of an increasingly complex society, legal rationality in Islamic jurisprudence which we call fiqh, presented scholars with the occasion to devise strategies that could clarify, limit, reject, or modify Hadith to address new questions. With it, it became possible to remember and revive older or alternative views that had been pushed to the margins because of their anomalies to the Hadith paradigm.

Relying on historical memory, jurists developed a major argument on the question of the imamate to engage Hadith, namely the notion of communal agreement, ijmaa. Ijmaa, or consensus , the idea that if the community agrees on a legal or theological issue, its consensus became a legally binding verdict, first appeared in the text of al-Shafi’I’s al-Risala, in which the imamate was presented as an obligation dictated by communal consensus. The idea of ijmaa gradually spread in jurisprudential and theological writings until it became a major justification for the necessity of the imamate among Sunni jurists and theologians in the tenth century. It seems that ijmaa played a dual role as a construct that reigned in Hadith-based assertion, floating around without a strict methodological structure, and perhaps more importantly, it opened the door to embrace and absorb community’s experience as a source of legitimacy. Ijmaa had its own limitations and had its critics, however. It was essentially a legal principle, it favored jurisprudential solutions for political questions, and it did not have wide applicability, since it became an abstract concept with limited value confined to a limited number of cases.

Additional constraints on both the Hadith and the ijmaa came from an elephant in the room. That is the legacy of imperial practices and ideologies in the Near East, which found talented supporters since the 7th century, and experienced a renaissance from the ninth century onward. Expressed and elaborated in treatises of advice to governors, caliphs and princes, this genre began largely with translating Sassanian imperial literature into Arabic as exemplified in the writings of Ibn al-Muqaffa in the 8th century. It gradually incorporated aspects of practical ethics, akhlaq, jurisprudence, and Greek political philosophy, forming an influential political ideology that amirs and sultans of the late Abbasid and post-Mongol periods aspired to emulate. Interested primarily in practical governance and the ways by which royal authority could be maintained, siyasa was a distinct discourse on government, therefore part of the struggle during and after the tenth century. From the perspective of the jurists, engaging siyasa did undermine their own basic principles.

The third discourse engaged by Ibn Taymiya was use of the principle of maslaha—welfare or social utility. Al-Juwayni (d. 1085) marks a major shift in political thinking with his introduction of the notion of maslaha into legal and theological reasoning. In general, maslaha denotes welfare and is used by theologians and jurists after al-Juwayni to mean the general good or the public interest. Anything which helps to avert injury and furthers human welfare is considered maslaha. The argument from maslaha about the origins of government is based on the premise that social life and leadership are necessary for human survival and betterment, and as such, rulership is needed merely to protect, arbitrate, administer, and in some cases to avoid chaos and self-destruction. Once al-Juwayni made the principle of welfare his overriding argument, he was able to make another leap to discuss polities other than the imamate. He acknowledged that forms of government other than the imamate are also legitimate as long as they ensure welfare, maintain social harmony and prevent chaos. Al-Juwayni’s maslaha was a very perceptive intervention, and his contemporaries and later generations of scholars engaged his views. Al-Juwayni’s student al Ghazali refined maslaha as a concept and argued more extensively and broadly than his teacher for its use in elaborating on social and political life.

Once the notion of public welfare became part of the vocabulary, especially in regard to politics other than the imamate, it brought to the fore additional semantic questions within its field. Was divine law universal? What was the status of societies customs and traditions without it? What was the role of reason in determining the value of things in the absence of revelation? It is not difficult to imagine that such questions brought jurists and theologians intellectually face to face with human nature and human societies at large, and presented them with a new opportunity to expand the conceptual “toolbox” of Sunni epistemology. This is where jurists and theologians engaged a crucial subject long discussed among philosophers. Why does humankind need coercive authority in the first place? Why should social organization be beneficial to humans? Initially, the subject was raised as a philosophical question among the philosophers, and later made its way into juristic and theological writings, becoming a major aspect of the discourse shortly after the emergence of the theory of welfare.

To Prof. Yücesoy’s knowledge, the first among the jurists and theologians to discuss this problem in some depth were al-Ghazali and his contemporary Raghib al-Isfahani. The argument is that humankind is civil by nature, in Arabic, “al-insan madaniyyun bi al-tab’.” This is familiar to us from the history of philosophy, but here it is something new among the jurists and theologians. Humans have a natural propensity to live in communities and therefore need to cooperate among themselves. From human cooperation results the familiar storyline of the birth of human communities and eventually the rise of cities and so forth. One must admit that this line of thought is very much different from an argument based simply on a tradition attributed to the Prophet asking the faithful to institute rulership or leadership.

Returning to Ibn Taymiya’s text, it is creatively linked to a web of discourses that the author is deliberately bringing to the foreground for discussion. The text is in fact a palimpsest containing layers of both the erased and the erasing, the absorbed and absorbing, and the transformed and transforming. It is an intricate transposition. Without its corresponding text, we would not be able to appreciate these points in depth, and would not realize the nuances of the other texts. Like his earlier colleague al-Ghazali, Ibn Taymiya thought about the question of reform and revival, and was bold enough to challenge categories, beginning with his own Hanbali background. It is instructive to see how a younger contemporary of his-- the Asharite al-Iji and still younger scholar Spanish Maliki scholar al-Shatibi expanded on his ideas.

So the relevant question, in conclusion, is far from asking how we come from point A to point B in terms of decline or progress. The real task is to reconstruct a spiderweb that the passage time, and we as scholars, have disturbed, so that we can re-imagine individuals and societies in their complex connectedness.

Citations:

Ahmad b. ‘Abd al-HalÄ«m b. Taymiyya, Public Duties in Islam: The Institution of the Hisba, Tr. Mukhtar Holland (Leicester, UK: Islamic Foundation, 1982), pp. 20-22 (with modification).

Sabine, George. A history of political theory. 3rd ed. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1961.

Burns, J. The Cambridge history of political thought, 1450-1700. Cambridge ;;New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Husseyin Yilmaz Presentation Summary

One of the areas that the decline paradigm does not problematize is how the Islamic tradition was inherited and adopted by later cultural entities. In that context Prof. Yılmaz discussed how the Ottomans were exposed to the broader Islamic tradition, how they adopted it, and how they produced different manifestations of Islam. He focused on the area of language.

When the Ottomans appeared around the late thirteenth, they were linguistically different from the surrounding cultural context, so they were not fully capable of absorbing the broader Islamic tradition despite their exposure. They were Islamically much less educated than the broader Arab and Persian constituency, and because they were expanding towards non-Muslim territories, they had historically very little exposure to traditional Islamic institutions of learning. That led to a very different kind of development from that of other Islamic historical periods. One tendency among the proponents of conventional decline paradigm is to look for great figures in the Ottoman Empire who are comparable to such medieval figures as al-Mawardi and al-Farabi. We don’t find such figures because the Ottomans had a very different historical experience in their exposure to and adaptation of Islam.

Prof. Yılmaz began with an early sixteenth century passage from a translation regarding contemporary perceptions of Arabic tradition and Turkish, which helps illustrate how Turkish became an important medium for conveying the broader Islamic tradition into the Ottoman context. Aksarayi, in his translation of Imad al-Islam, stated:

“Do not take this book lightly just because it is in Turkish, for it contains thorough knowledge and practice. Every people have their own language and people cannot benefit from other languages. Had Prophet Muhammad been here, he would have spoken Turkish, because he could only address people in this way. The Qur’an indicates that messengers were sent to people in their own languages. We know that the Prophet said, “learning in a duty for every male and female Muslim.” But this does not mean that they have to learn it in Arabic from a teacher, nor it means that the duty is unfulfilled if one does not study it in Arabic. Know that the ultimate objective is to acquire knowledge regardless of the way one may pursue to achieve it. It makes no difference whether one learns it through studying Arabic with an instructor, by hearing from a scholar, or by reading books in Turkish. Although I put a Turkish garment on this book, its meaning is revealed Arabic. Because God revealed knowledge in Arabic, Arab scholars explained it in Arabic for the benefit of their people. Then, when knowledge passed to Persia, Persian scholars continued to write scholarly works in Arabic. But for the common folks, they wrote in Persian, because common folks could only benefit from it in Persian. When the knowledge passed to the land of Turks, Rumeli, the scholars of the Rum continued to write only in Arabic, and knowledge remained as a buried treasure for the common people. Therefore just as the muftis of our time issue their legal opinions in Turkish, I reveal this treasure which was buried under Arabic and Persian to the common people despite the false assumptions of the jealous.”

There are a number of important insights in this short passage, such as the insight about being able to write in Turkish instead of Arabic or Persian. It further points to the tension between Islamic universalism vs. vernacular identities. But, more importantly, it shows that by the mid-sixteenth century, Turkish had become the language of literary culture in the Ottoman Empire, a process that has been little questioned in scholarship. The fact that this cultural formation could not simply be taken for granted is the starting point of my inquiry. In the other two empires discussed in this forum, Turkish did not become the primary language of literary culture, despite the fact that both the Mughal and Safavid Empires were ruled by Turkish dynasties. The Ottoman Empire was founded by speakers of Turkic languages as well so, demographically, Turkish could still have continued to be the language of oral communication. But as a medium of cultural and administrative articulation, it didn’t have to become a single, hegemonic language by the sixteenth century. This was the result of a peculiar historical process that was uneven, and that was prompted by specific historical developments.

The historical process by which Turkish became a literary language seems to have gained a noticeable momentum in the aftermath of the Battle of Ankara in 1402. The Ottoman defeat by the Timurids led to a moment of crisis that prompted a search for good government. During the ensuing interregnum, marked by a fierce succession struggle among competing princes, a number of important texts on good government were translated from Persian and Arabic.

At the time, Turkish was still not a literary language. First of all, the lack of orthography made writing in this language a daunting task for both authors and translators. Second, it was still a profane language; namely, it lacked even the most basic vocabulary to express Islamic views that was already ingrained in Turkish high and folk culture alike. In interlinear Qur’anic translations, for example, even the most popular of Islamic terms needed to be translated, such as God, Heaven, Hell, and prayer, a fact that may point to vernacular consciousness, but also demonstrates that the target audience for these translations were more comfortable in using the vocabulary of their indigenous religious tradition. Translating these basic Islamic terms into a profane language was quite a feat on the part of translators. But perhaps a more challenging problem was the lack of a readership for Turkish because the literate members of society were already educated in Persian or Arabic. As a result there was not yet a considerable reading audience for Turkish. Writing in Turkish was a sign of lacking both education and social status which could easily attach its user a lingering stigma.

Hoca Mes’ud in the early fourteenth century was one of those early adventurers in Turkish writing who declared his task a moral obligation: “I wrote in Turkish because it is more appropriate to speak to people in their own language, and people nowadays all speak Turkish.” But he was more blunt when he voiced the technical difficulties and social challenges he faced: “Turkish doesn’t fit the meter or rhythm. The language of the Turk is such a strange language. When I write in Turkish I was half mortified because of shame. I fear that someone will read it and belittle me for ignorance.” An anonymous contemporary of his couldn’t agree more: “My country is Turk, my language is Turk, I wrote Turkish because people speak Turkish. Turkish is not easy to read or write, it is not a known language. Turkish lacks suitable expressions; it is cold with no taste. Turkish is dry and rough like Turks. If you work on the form, you will lose the meaning. If you keep the meaning, you lose the form.” Many such early authors highlighted these difficulties and reflected their anxiety of being stigmatized as uncultured. In similar vein, a translator who humbly identified himself as not being a learned man told the dramatic story behind his undertaking. As he stated, he implored his brother, who was a well-regarded scholar, for years to write a book to educate the little learned folks on Islamic matters. His brother refused to write in Turkish because of this stigma, but ultimately agreed to write in Arabic. The author then translated it into Turkish, relieved his brother from that anxiety and took the risk upon himself.

Those early writers deployed a number of reasons to justify their use of Turkish. One was the Qur’anic precedent that prophets addressed their people in their own languages. Considering themselves as vicegerents of prophets, they justified writing in Turkish as taking up the same mission. The translators also attributed an instrumental value to language, careful not to undermine Arabic’s status, and pointed to the meaning rather than the language itself as the ultimate goal. In that regard, many fifteenth century authors also claimed to have conveyed the same meaning in Turkish as in Arabic, despite the fact that this claim may not have been taken very seriously by their contemporaries. GülÅŸehri, for example, claimed that he created a better work than the Persian original. Some translators were motivated by piety, taking on the obligation to educate the masses who were mostly illiterate, Turkish-speaking, and uneducated in Islamic matters. More significantly, using Turkish was particularly prompted by a marked demand on the part of uneducated rulers themselves, who commissioned the translation of books not only for their broader constituencies but for their own use. In this way, medical and political works were translated for the use of the courts and masses.

An important story from around the thirteenth century indicates the level of education among these early rulers. It was conveyed by a sixteenth century Ottoman source, but is quite telling for the broader western Anatolia at this time. A GermiyanoÄŸlu ruler, neighboring the Ottomans at the frontier was reported to have enjoyed poetry and kept a number of poets at his court. One poet, Åžeyhi, was a very respected poet and often presented the ruler with very elaborate poems. But the ruler had difficulty in understanding his poetry. In one of his courtly gatherings an unknown poet took up the word in Turkish and said, “My illustrious Sultan. I wish you well, may you eat honey and cream, and walk on fine grass.” Upon hearing this words which were not more a rhymed praise, the sultan said: “That is the kind of poetry I want to hear. It is pure Turkish, it is simple, it has no mystical value”. He rewarded the poetaster by promoting him to his chief court poet and dismissed the others. One of those dismissed poets is said to have died from grief at the degradation of culture.

Such little educated rulers seemed to have been more and more interested in Turkish. These rulers also seemed to have developed interest in Turkish as a propaganda medium for noting that Turkish texts had a broader chance of reaching to common folks who could not read Persian or Arabic but could only comprehend when read in Turkish. These translated texts were often prefaced by long panegyrics about the ruler. Ottoman rulers capitalized on this tradition, sponsoring and commissioning the translation of a number of books that circulated widely. In that regard, Murad II seems to have seized the moment; during his reign of 30 years he commissioned the translation of over 30 books into Turkish. Most of these were very well-read, popular books in medicine, poetry, and Islamic sciences. With few exceptions, all were also accompanied by panegyrics for the benefit of the Ottoman sultan.

With the gradual institutionalization of Ottoman education, Turkish also became the language of learning as well. In medreses and Sufi convents where lectures were based on text-reading, translation became same as teaching. Textbooks were kept in original languages, whether Persian in the Sufi convents, or Arabic in Ottoman medreses but got translated and commented upon when taught. Ottoman learned men still continued to write in Arabic, especially in the Islamic sciences, and most Ottoman Sufis kept writing in Persian. However, the medium to teach these texts increasingly became Turkish, and the number of copies with marginal explanatory notes increased drastically. As a result, the very teaching activity came to be dominated by Turkish. Overall, by the sixteenth century, more than 200 titles had been translated into Turkish from Arabic and Persian. In the meantime, translation gained a much broader meaning than a mere rendering a text from one language to another. Thanks to this unprecedented translation activity of the previous two centuries Turkish became firmly established as the primary language of Ottoman culture and administration by the sixteenth century. As such, it became a language capable of expressing even the most complicated concepts and ideas in the Arabic and Persian tradition. The anxiety in writing Turkish diminished. To the contrary, there was an anti-translation movement in the sixteenth century in which a group of poets who boasted to have been inventors, belittled and criticized poets and scholars who translated from Arabic and Persian, or who used poetic motifs from Persian in their Turkish poetry. Such a reaction points to the formation of a very different cultural identity. Re-capping this historical process, Prof. Yılmaz showed how, Turkish itself, not Arabic or Persian, became the main vehicle for conveying the broader Islamic tradition into the Ottoman context.

Stephen Dale Presentation Summary

Prof. Dale discussed commonalties among the three empires or states. Before beginning, he issued a few cautions on how historians talk about these commonalities. The first is the question of multiple identities of individuals. Dale cited the example of Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire. In the Babur-Nama, he talked about his father, Shaykh Mirza, who in a very telling passage, described how his father would wear a Mongol cap when he was sitting around with his Turco-Mongol buddies drinking or doing other things. In the same passage, he said that when his father held court in the Ferghana Valley, that he would then put on the turban. This passage describes on one hand Babur’s father’s Turco-Mongol identity, which was a social and military identity, and his religious identity as a Muslim. When he sat at court, he was acting as a Muslim sultan. When he sat with his Turco-Mongol colleagues, drinking as they often did, he was acting as a Turco-Mongol warrior. It is worth keeping in mind that individuals in these empires could and did shift across different identities, depending on the context in which they were operating at a given time.

A further illustration of this in a political theory sense is a work by the fourteenth century Indo-Muslim historian Birani who is a kind of Indian equivalent of Mustafa Ali, someone who has been thrown out of work and is complaining about the situation. Birani, in a political theory work, talks about the problems of the Delhi Sultans, that they don’t govern like Muslim rulers. Here is this massive country, he says, where most of the people are still Hindus. In the streets of Delhi are Hindu bankers, Hindu merchants, Hindu rulers of one kind or another, sometimes with Muslim servants running in front of them to clear out the crowds. He complains that this is terrible: here is a ruler who is Muslim but he’s not ruling over a Muslim state. But then in the same treatise, Birani says, “Well, how can one rule a country like India?” He said that the way to govern such a country is to rule like a Persian emperor. So here again are the different identities of someone who is Muslim, technically in a Muslim state, patronizing Muslim institutions, decrying the problems but at the same time saying the ruler must rule it like the old-fashioned, pre-Islamic Persian empire. Inhabiting these different, seemingly contradictory identities at the upper levels of society in such Muslim states, or Muslim empires as the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughals may be a common characteristic.

Prof. Dale spoke about these three states as sharing a common civilization or common culture within a larger Islamic civilization. Here he is thinking about the way anthropologists talk about cultures and civilizations. Many in the audience may be familiar with the standard work by American anthropologists A. L. Kroeber & Clyde Kluckhohn, Understanding Culture in which they define the essence of civilization and culture as a distinction in values from one culture or civilization to another. This kind of thing is apparent in al-Biruni’s work on India. When he entered India he was shocked by what he saw, and revealed the distinctions in the values of a person moving from a Greco-Islamic Central Asian context into a Hindu South Asian context. His shock at the culture he encountered was really palpable.

On the other hand, these three empires are usually considered separately. For example, the late John Richards was a scholar of the Mughal Empire who hardly discussed anything outside of it at all. In general, students of Ottoman Turkish at Ohio State University hardly take any courses outside of Ottoman history. The same is true of students who work on the Safavids. There is an extraordinary isolation among the students and scholars of these fields, despite the lack of any justification for it. In fact, the opposite is true—these three empires form a cultural sphere in the same sense that Europe forms a cultural sphere. While there are no doubt great differences among these empires in terms of the territories they conquered, their religious attitudes—particularly in the Shi’i and Sunni divide—but at least at the level of the dynasty, the military aristocracy, the bureaucracy and the literati, there is a common civilization. These three empires are common legatees of political, religious, literary, artistic, and philosophical traditions which are very striking commonalties in all three of these empires or states. At the same time, merchants, poets, religious vagabonds, philosophers, and military advisors circulated freely, constantly crossing the borders of these territories. Particularly in the case of Iran and India such movement occurred, and in the Ottoman case, military advisors of their time turned up at Babur’s Battle of Panipat in 1526, in India. His Ottoman military advisors organized the military based on Ottoman models.

Prof. Dale discussed the categories into which these empires or states fit. First, they were all Turco-Mongol states to one degree or another. In the case of the Mughals, they were Turco-Mongols whose lineage was impossible not to envy—descended both from Genghis Khan on this mother’s side, and Timur on his father’s side. In the case of the Safavids this factor was more muted, but still related to the Turkic White Sheep and the Black Sheep dynasties, in northwestern and western Iran, in the matrilineal sense. Shah Ismail was a Turk, and of course he spoke a Turkic language and wrote his poetry in what might be regarded as an old-fashioned version of Azeri Turkish, while the Ottoman Selim was writing poetry in Persian. In the Ottoman case, Prof. Yilmaz just spoke about the development of the Turkish language the Ottomans spoke, an Oguz Turkish which eventually became the spoken and written language of the Ottoman Empire. Some poets complained about borrowing from the Persian, and encouraged the Ottomans to improve their literary language and stop borrowing from Persian.

In terms of the political and military heritage, they were Turco-Mongol states. Their sense of their Turkic origins was particularly strong in the Mughal and the Ottoman case. The Mughals were still sending money back to Samarkand until they fell apart in the early part of the eighteenth century. The Ottomans at various times in their history became more or less concerned with their Oguz ancestors or presumptive ancestors in Central Asia. There was much less of this shared Turco-Mongol heritage in the Safavid case, in which religious identity became more important than racial or linguistic identity in their heritage.

In terms of the language, it is also interesting that all of these Mughals spoke a Turkic language. Babur wrote his memoirs in Chagatai Turkish; among the Safavids, Shah Ismail wrote his poetry in Azeri Turkish, and Turkish was used in the Ottoman Empire. In the case of the Mughals, by the seventeenth century, Turkish had evaporated as a written language, but it was still spoken by some members of the dynasty. Jahangir, when he went to Kabul in the early seventeenth century, specifically congratulated himself for being able to read Babur’s memoirs while he was in Kabul revisiting his ancestors’ homeland. In the Safavid case, Turkish was spoken at the court of Shah Abbas and even at the court of the Qajars in the nineteenth century; their Turkish identity continued. To some extent, the sub-culture of Azeri Turkish continues to the present day, but only in the Ottoman Empire did Turkish become the dominant literary and cultural language of the empire.

Another striking feature of the shared political heritage was the fact that all of these dynasties shared the same problems of succession following the death of a ruler. The idea of shared sovereignty was a characteristic of tribes in general, but particularly of Turco-Mongol tribes in Central Asia. Preference was often given to the eldest son, but that didn’t guarantee that the eldest son would inherit the throne. In the Ottoman case and in the Safavid case the problem was “solved” if we can think of it in those terms, by immersion of the successors in the harem. Whether or not one could call it a “solution” from the point of view of the heirs, there was the scene of coffins coming out of the Topkapi Palace, but it was certainly a solution from the point of view of the ruling dynasty. In the Mughal case, there was never a serious attempt to change the system which led to a civil war upon the death or illness of each ruler. This Turco-Mongol inheritance pattern continued to the end of the dynasty. It is possible to look upon this and consider it an advantage to the dynasty because the most capable military leader would rise to the top, and perhaps that was true in several cases, but it probably wasn’t true in the eighteenth century. In all of these empires there was this same political inheritance.

In all three of these dynasties there was reverence for the Timurids of Herat. All three of these dynasties looked back at Herat as the ideal of Turkic literary and artistic culture. Mustafa Ali wrote about this in his history. The Safavids tried to generate a phony connection with Timur, and Babur and his descendants looked upon Herat as the high point of Timurid culture, before the Timurid Renaissance in South Asia. In the case of the Ottomans and Safavids, there was what might be called “lineage envy,” or the attempt to formulate a lineage which would provide the advantages of descent that the Mughals had, relating both to Timur and Genghis Khan as Central Asian lineages. In terms of political inheritance, the three shared aspects of the Sassanian legacy of the concept of the just sultan, and the political tradition of the Sassanians was present at all of these courts and dynasties to one degree or another.

The most obvious continuity or similarity among these empires are the literary and philosophical links. The literary links alluded to by the panelists at this Forum are extraordinarily strong. Persian literature dominated and became the model for the literary tradition both in Mughal India and in the Ottoman Empire. Even after the Ottomans shifted to writing poetry in Turkish, much of this poetry consisted of a string of Persian words ending with a Turkic verb. Even after Turkish became more important, the dominance of Persian literary models was quite striking.

Secondly, in terms of a point raised by Rajeev Kinra about the Sabk-i Hindi and the evolution of literary tradition, Prof. Dale noted that it has been discussed as early as the first decades of the twentieth century. An Indo-Muslim literary historian talked about this in the early 1920s. He mentioned wading through an entire Persian text on Sabk-i Hindi, which in some Ottoman literary sources was also referred to in the sense of literary changes in the tradition. The common literary inheritance and the common literary changes are another common feature in all three empires.

Thirdly, there was a common artistic tradition on which all three drew. The miniature painting was primarily a tradition originating in Iran and moving to India, or perhaps it came out of Timurid Iranian culture and the Timurid state, moved to India, then was adopted by court painters in the Ottoman Empire. No doubt there were changes in subjects and techniques in the different regions, just as there were changes and variations in the cultural expressions of European states, to recall the parallel made earlier in this presentation, which reflect a common literary inheritance from the Romans. Many of the illustrated manuscripts and in India as well as in the Ottoman empire were texts chosen for illustration were often based on Iranian literary models, notwithstanding differing traditions.

Finally, to end with a point related to political theory, there is the common philosophical inheritance of all these states. It is striking in all of these empires that they all accepted Aristotle as the First Teacher, and with it Neo-Platonic philosophy. The philosophical tradition that becomes so important in Isfahan and Shiraz in the seventeenth century is that heritage, and has tremendous influence in India. It really dominates some of the philosophical developments of the seventeenth century.

One other point is the cross-cutting influence of some of the Sufi movements, particularly the Naqshbandi order. Ahmed Sirhindi, the famous Naqshbandi shaikh in India, had a teacher who was a member of the Khawajah group in Central Asia. He came to India and gave instruction in the Naqshbandi tradition. Sirhindi referred to himself as the Mujadid [reformer] of this tradition, which was transmitted back into the Middle East in Kurdish areas and eventually, in the case of the early twentieth century, was influential as one of the most important Ottoman religious figures of the early twentieth century.

Keeping all of these commonalties in mind, Prof. Dale cited an important difference among these empires in connection with the presentations of the forum. In relation to the rise and decline of empires, the influence of Ibn Khaldun is striking. Only among Ottoman intellectuals was Ibn Khaldun considered seriously and discussed at length. That was because the Ottomans were conscious of what Ibn Khaldun said about the rise and fall of dynasties, and they worried that his work was a predictive model for themselves, and so they voiced these concerns. There does not seem to have been a parallel influence in the case of the Safavids or the Mughals, where there was no such tradition of decline literature, certainly at the political level, that there was among intellectuals of the Ottoman Empire. So, emphasizing the similarities among the three empires, this is one major difference, namely the discussion of the rise and fall of empires itself. This discourse was personified in the figure of Ibn Khaldun. In turn, in relation to al-Ghazali and the concept of society and social groups, reading Ibn Khaldun makes it clear that the source for that idea in al-Ghazali is in fact Aristotle, bringing us back to the shared philosophical heritage of the three empires.

Cengiz Sisman Presentation Summary

One of the major sub-fields of the “golden age” and “decline” paradigm is the treatment of non-Muslims in Muslim societies. Prof. Sisman stated the importance of the topic of non-Muslims in this forum, and mentioned that while there have been significant revisions and paradigm shifts in studies on “non-Muslims under Islam” on the intellectual level in the field Islamic history, this paradigm shift has not necessarily taken effect in popular or public policy levels. Prof. Sisman, through mainly addressing the status of Jews and Christians in the Ottoman Empire, visited the question of “golden age” and “decline” paradigms, and proposed a new model, called “semi-autonomous millet-system” to understand the ottoman method of managing the diversity. His presentation had three main objectives: (1) the issue of decline with a particular reference to the Ottoman Jews; (2) the necessity of replacing the famous so-called “millet system” model in examining the Ottoman non-Muslims; and (3) deriving lessons from the multi-religious and multi-ethnic Ottoman experience for the contemporary societies and transferring this intellectual knowledge into public knowledge.

Prof. Sisman began by exploring the decline paradigm and expressions of it in the Ottoman Jewish context. The declinist thesis tended to view the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through the binary oppositions of purity and corruption. This model implied that only two legal situations were possible for non-Muslims: thick enforcement or lax disregard of the restrictions mandated by Islamic law. For a long period, historiography on the status of the non-Muslims in the Muslim empires was inspired by this dichotomy. According to this model, the non-Muslims, particularly Jews, Christians, and Hindus, lived in relative peace and harmony during the Golden Age, but with the introduction of orthodoxy and the puritanical and enthusiastic tendency in Islam, they then experienced exclusion, oppression, and even persecution. In the present context Sisman referred to the golden age as the reign of Suleyman the Magnificent in Ottoman times, Abbas the Great in Safavid Times, and Akbar the Great in the Mughal times. By the introduction of the orthodoxy, on the other hand, he referred to the Kadizadeli in Ottoman times, and Majlisi in Safavid times, and Aurangzeb in the Mughal times.

Examining the Jewish case in the Ottoman Empire is quite instructive in showing how this golden age and decline works in modern scholarship. Jews occupied important if not unique positions within the Ottoman socio-political and economic order. They were contractors, purveyors, private bankers, political advisors and physicians for the Ottoman court and other court matters; they made significant contributions to the Ottoman society in science, technology, culture and entertainment. They were one of the largest and most important non-Muslim communities in the Ottoman Empire.

Influenced by the Ottoman declinist argument, Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis claimed that the conditions of Ottoman Jews started to deteriorate in the seventeenth century due to the fact that immigration of Iberian Jewry was coming to a halt, economic opportunities within the Ottoman Empire were diminishing, and competition with the Christians was increasing. The declinist approach also assumes, then, that the Sabbataian movement (1665-1666) had a major destructive impact on already declining Jewish communities. In other words Sabbataianism , one of the largest if not the largest and most important Jewish messianic movements, did occur in the Ottoman empire, and its repercussions were felt not only within Ottoman territory but in all of the Jewish communities across borders in Europe, Russia, and other eastern communities. According to this argument, the Sabbataianmovement had a major destructive impact on these communities, accelerating their decline in two ways: (1) it is said to have undermined the Jewish position within the Ottoman system, since they lost their credibility in the eyes of the Ottomans; (2) it is said to have contributed to an unprecedented reinforcement of rabbinical power which was viewed as an obstacle to possible progressive development in subsequent centuries, including the nineteenth century.

Prof. Sisman stated that his study of Ottoman court and archival sources, as well as Jewish and European sources, forced him to revise this assumption. Along with the problems with the general Ottoman decline paradigm itself, the decline of the Ottoman Jewry has been the subject of misinterpretation and misrepresentation. For example, a longitudinal study of court record of Haskoy, which hasbeen one of the largest Jewish communities in Istanbul, showed that there was no dramatic change in the material or intellectual life of Jews in the first and second half of the seventeenth century and also the early eighteenth century. It is true that the Jews lost some of their privileged positions to the Greeks and Armenians in the seventeenth century in comparison to their privileged positions in the sixteenth century, but the pace & degree of so-called decline of the Ottoman Jews was greatly exaggerated by Jewish historians, who concentrated mainly on Jewish society or Jewish communities in Europe. Although it may be true that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were on the whole characterized by economic and spiritual impoverishment, that process was slow and was interspersed with periods of stability and even prosperity, as in the case of Izmir Jewish community.

During the second quarter of the seventeenth century, one Rabbi Benvenista referred to the sultan as the “merciful king” and stated that the tax burden was not so heavy as that which the Jews had to suffer under Christianity. , At the turn of the eighteenth century Lady Montague, an English observer of the Ottoman empire, with some exaggeration obviously, described the role of the Jews in the Ottoman Empire as follows: “I observed that most of the rich tradesmen were Jews. That people are an incredible power in this empire. They have many privileges, above the natural Turks themselves, and have formed a very considerable commonwealth here. They are judged by their own laws, and have drawn the whole trade of empire into their hands, partly by the firm union among themselves. They are the physicians, the stewards, and the interpreters of all the great men in the empire.” This passage is not a lone example coming from the literary resources and reports in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which again shows that there was not a real, or dramatic decline in the eighteenth century with regard to the status of the Jews.

Similar observations could be made about the social and economic developments of the Christian communities in the Ottoman empire. They, too, did not have one general and seamless “golden age” or “decline” experience. To the contrary, they did have different experiences in different part of the empire. For example, examining Christian communities of seventeenth and eighteenth century in Greece, Socrates Petmezas demonstrates that those communities enjoyed high levels of autonomy and economic prosperity in the eighteenth century. The rise of Phanariots, members of prominent Greek families in the Ottoman economy and diplomacy could be another example to challenge the assumption of continuous decline of the Ottoman non-Muslims. There were obviously counter-examples, indicating the impoverishment of the non-Muslims in different regions, but still examples and counter-examples challenge the overgeneralized assumptions of the declinist paradigm.

Prof. Sisman’s second focus was a review of the so-called “millet system” and to propose a new model or new concept by which to re-conceptualize the status of non-Muslims within the Ottoman Empire. Millet literally means “religion” in the Ottoman context. Without resorting to oversimplification, following the tradition of previous Islamic governance practices, the Ottomans considered Jews and Christians as People of the Book, or dhimma, the protected subject. The mechanism was simple: if a group wished to keep their religion, they had to pay a poll tax which was called a jizya, and in return for paying this special tax, Jews and Christians were allowed to practice their religion, and their lives and properties were under the protection of the state law. This law was inspired mostly by Islamic law.

It was generally believed that following the conquest of Istanbul or Constantinople in 1453, Mehmet II established a separate, parallel and autonomous organization for the Orthodox, Armenian, and Jewish subjects. These were supposedly homogeneous, empire-wide structures with well-defined borders and hierarchies, controlled by Istanbul through their ecclesiastical leaders, the Greek and Armenian patriarch and the Jewish chief rabbi. This so-called millet system, was a well-organized, well-regulated government of the minorities. Writing in the 1950s, Gibb and Bowen, in their book, Islamic Society and the West: A Study of the Impact of Western Civilization on Moslem Culture in the Near East consolidated the image of a timeless, fixed, unchanging “millet-system.” Arguing against this point, and writing in the 1980s, Benjamin Braudel claimed that the existence of the “millet-system” was a myth, and that it dated to the post-Tanzimat period of the nineteenth century, and had been super-imposed on the previous centuries. Yes, Braudel agreed, Mehmet II, had an ambition to create a centralized system by which he would control the non-Muslim subjects, but this system declined and did not work in the subsequent centuries. Since the 1980s, scholarship on the subject oscillated between two poles, claiming the existence or non-existence of the “millet-system.” Most of the time, historians either studied the Ottoman side of the story or the communal side of the story and concluded that there was a longitudinal autonomous “millet-system” or lack thereof. Without necessarily resorting to all available sources on both sides, they either studied internal life of the communities, or the formal Ottoman structures that linked them to the state.

The conviction about communal autonomy has encouraged the study of Jewish and Christian communities as self-contained entities having no interaction or relations with the communities of other confessions. Since this conference is also about re-conceptualization or re-framing of some of our old concepts and vocabularies, Sisman stated, he wanted to suggest a new concept for understanding inter-confessional diversity management in the Ottoman Empire. Sisman proposed that “semi-autonomous millet system” would better explain the phenomenon between the time of Mehmet II (1450s) up to the 1850s in the Ottoman Empire. He stated that there are three essential characteristics to this so-called millet system: internal autonomy of religious communities; their hierarchically and centrally organized empire-wide structures; and Ottoman recognition of those systems. It is true that pre-nineteenth century non-Muslim communities did not have these three characteristics all at the same time in a full fledge manner, but traces of these characteristics were there for sure. For example, they did have autonomy in their religious and economic affairs. And it seems that they were also hierarchically organized, though not empire-wide. Rather, smaller or medium-sized communities accepted the authority of religious and lay leadership of nearby larger ones, and in return received spiritual and material help from them. Naturally, being the spiritual and communal center, Istanbul was the highest religious authority for the Jewish and Christian communities.

Centralized collection of taxes was another factor contributing to the foundation of congregational and communal unity. One example would illustrate how this semi-autonomous, hierarchically organized communal structure was working in the Ottoman empire.. Again, the case of the Sabbataian movement, that mentioned earlier, is a very constructive example to show the hierarchy and autonomy and also the connectedness of those communities in the empire. , During the movement, which emerged in Jerusalem, then moved into Izmir, Istanbul and Edirne, Istanbul Jewry played an important role in shaping its trajectory.. The chief rabbi of Istanbulsent letters to other Jewish communities,, trying to control the Sabbataian activities in Jewish communities of Cairo,Jerusalem, Aleppo, Izmir and the Balkans. Feeling himself probably more responsible before the Ottoman authorities, the chief rabbi from Istanbul sent a letter to the sultan, thanking him that he had ended the “Sabbataian madness” , and thereby saved Ottoman Jewry from a malady.

Similar examples coming from the Jewish and Christian communities indicate that there was a considerable amount of autonomy, and a communal leadership headed by Istanbul even before the nineteenth century. These autonomies were controlled by the Ottoman authorities through taxation and through approval of the communal leadership, meaning that non-Muslims elect their leader internally, but the leaders had to be approved—not chosen—by the Ottoman authorities. By providing alternative courts for the members of other non Muslim communities, the Ottomans set in place a system of checks and balances, in the tendencies followed by non-Muslim communities. It is important to remember, however, that the borders between the faiths and the communities were fluid enough that individual agencies could always transcend those borders, thanks to social mobility. The most prominent road to social mobility was conversion, but even without conversion, members of the non-Muslim communities could move along these borders and attain social mobility.

This semi-autonomous millet system turned into a millet-system by the second half of the nineteenth century when Muslims and non-Muslims became equal citizens before the law. This major shift in long established Islamic practice of taxation and population taxsonomy became possible through the efforts of reform-minded Ottoman intellectuals and bureaucrats. Inspired by the ideals of French Revolution, these intellectuals wanted to create somewhat an egalitarian society, despite resistances originated from the traditional segments of Muslim and non-Muslim communities. Jizya was replaced by a practice of buying off military service on the part of the non-Muslims. Non-Muslim communities were recognized as corporate units with a degree of internal autonomy that regulated personal status, ritual issues, and finances according to their religious law and custom, with state support for their communal authorities.

By way of conclusion, Prof. Sisman made reference to public policy discussions. The Ottoman empire held together a remarkably broad mix of people—ethnic and religious groups—in a relatively peaceful and stable co-existence. Non-Muslim millets, or non-Sunnis in the Ottoman case, were legally subordinate to Muslims. Still, it is very hard to imagine that Ottomans maintained this system with the sheer force of naked power. They needed to have a measure of legitimacy to do that. How did the Ottomans maintain or manage this diversity over many centuries? ? This is one of the major questions that are waiting to be tackled by scholars thoroughly. Examining the Ottoman case help us to understand the working mechanisms of , a multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, multi-religious community.

Examining the Ottoman case also provides with an instructive example for contemporary believing Muslim individuals and states , which could derive lessons from the the Ottoman reformist intellectuals, legalists, and bureaucrats who struggled with contemporary issues, such asequality of Muslims and non-Muslims, nationalism, citizenship, and authority, and resolved them within the parameters of Islamic legal and political traditions There is also a lesson for other decision makers who are trying to create harmonious societies in an age when religion is still of paramount importance to people, and they again need to come up with better or more refined solutions other than the nation and secular states would suggest.

Engin Akarli, Brown University

Nelly Hanna, American University, Cairo

Andrew Newman, University of Edinburgh

Engin Akarli Presentation Summary

Prof. Akarli spoke of decline after 1300, another form of decline after Suleyman, Abbas, and Akbar, and the reasons for decline as a concept and a discourse that developed in Europe and is relevant to and concerned with developments in northwestern Europe. According to that concept, Islam’s function was to pass along the intellectual link to the Greeks, and once the Muslims did that, their role ended. Another form of the decline paradigm emphasized a return to an imagined, pure state of civilization, in this case a pure form of Islam. The rest of history represents a departure from that pure state. Yet another form of decline related to the concept of the nation-state, in the sense that the development of history as a discipline is also a function of the 19th century and a servant of the nation-state—history serving to create a sense of nationality, of belonging. A convergence between centers of historical knowledge production in Europe with nationalists in the Muslim regions who were also creating such centers.

Akarli stated that addressing both decline paradigms must involve distinguishing between these various aspects in order to transcend these paradigms and write better histories. Because these paradigms rely on a dichotomy between East and West, on a polarity between Christianity and Islam, and because the concept of Western Civilization relies on the world-class notion of Enlightenment. More recently, the concept of a Judeo-Christian side of the polarity has developed, added to the earlier polarity that excluded Judaism.

Akarli noted the connection with Sisman’s paper in that the three empires were not “Islamic” in the sense that they were not majority Muslim polities. With the exception of the Safavid empire, most were not majority Muslim, even in the capital cities. We forget that the Ottoman empire became majority Muslim sometime in the middle of the 19th century, only after shedding some territory. This is a very important dimension in understanding Islamic law. When scholars talk about Islamic law, people assume it means a law for Muslims, not for non-Muslims. Non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman are supposed to have been oppressed, according to this narrative, and only recovered a history after they broke free of the Ottoman empire in the 19th century. The clearest expression of this Orientalist discourse is the statement by Lord Cromer; “If Islam changes, it is no longer Islam.”

In discussing the first aspect of decline noted above, it is necessary to consider that the origins of the Ottoman empire are said to lie in Anatolia around 1300 CE, yet the Ottomans who built an enduring empire entered Anatolia in 1071 CE. About 3008 years later the Ottomans established the proto-empire. Historians need to ask, like Gabor Agoston for the later period, “What happened during those 300 years?” During that time, they must have established networks and formations on which they were able to build a stable society, and one that included people who did not share the same religion.

The focus on law offers a window on the complex relationships that make up society. It sheds light on various fields of force in society, including cultural norms and values held by different social groups. Law is important in perpetuating a regime’s legitimacy by providing society with a sense of order. Study of Ottoman legal practice should provide insights into the longevity of the Ottoman state, and obliges historians to include law in the broad picture of Ottoman history.

Akarli’s central contention was that the Ottoman empire could not have survived as long as it did without engendering a sense of justice and legitimacy among the people, a sense of order among both Muslims and non-Muslims. The Ottomans adopted Islamic legal traditions and built a legal system on that model from the very beginning. Unlike many scholars in both East and West, however, we should not presume a priori that the Ottoman legal system was meant only for Muslims, merely because of its Islamic origins. The Ottoman courts were open to all members of the state in all matters, and they were the only channel for some matters. Scholars are wrong in asserting that because non-Muslims took their cases the Ottoman courts, it means they had no autonomy. Islamic law did not preclude the existence of various levels of the courts. In certain matters other religious groups had their autonomy. In certain issues—even where there was autonomy—they could come to the courts and not be turned away. These state courts had to hear the cases.

Examining the sources of legal history is essential to bringing new information on the past to light. Ottoman legal sources are rich but thinly mined, and need scholars trained to use and make sense of them. The records of the shari’ah courts when they were the backbone of the system contain registered agreements, that are important because they precluded future disputes. There is a huge amount of this material in notary public registers of shari’ah courts. Summaries of settled cases are not enough. There are judicial files of the imperial court, cases heard by the two Chief Judges of the Council, a high court. Court case contain the whole history of the cases (Diwan Muhimme). Legally relevant decisions of the government include imperial edicts, decrees, advisory legal opinions (fatawa), individual fatwas from Ottoman period. Materials related to legal training of jurists and bureaucrats was also important. Handbooks and guides for judges were used in the colleges. Controversies such as Himmet Taskomur studies, engendered commentaries and super-commentaries, other writings of jurists and legal specialists. Manuscripts related to political ethics and history sometimes contain specific information on their relation to the fiqh tradition. Such literature was also written in languages spoken in the Ottoman Empire, including Greek and Arabic, mostly written by Christian Arabs. The Greek Orthodox Church has such documents, and synagogues have them as well.

The archives contain information on the judicial affairs of various communities that have not been examined before. There was a presumption that Muslims, Christians, Jews did not mingle, when in fact they did, and it would have been historically unsustainable if they had not. Alavis and Druze, other unorthodox Muslim communities have written on legal matters. Other literary and popular sources include Nasruddin jokes to mine for information about popular views of the qadis and rulers. One would hope that this rich material about legal history would be relevant to adjusting the old paradigms.

There is a presumption is that fiqh is Islamic law, and it is important, but , but the dialogue between court decisions and other activities in society is equally important. Study of Islamic law is changing, but still suffers from total incomprehension of how modern minds could incorporate religiosity in a legal setting. How could a world religion inspired by God and making constant reference to God have anything to do with our modern era. The companion assumption is of course that modern Western law never, ever had anything to do with religion. To the contrary, earlier versions of many states’ constitutions make reference to or directly quote the Bible, yet this is not taken into account, so that only Muslims persist in this antiquated thinking. Critical reading of these sources would enable us to understand these interconnected matters.

Nelly Hanna Presentation Summary

Prof. Hanna began with the question of decline in relation to Islamic law, stating that the paradigm of decline has been applied to its development in the Abbasid period in the 9th and 10th centuries, when it was articulated into the several schools of law. The traditional view, which has since been challenged by scholars (though it has been poorly absorbed among the public), was that was that following these two centuries, the door of ijtihad, or independent judgment was closed, and subsequently, Islamic law stopped developing to become an ossified, medieval, unchanging body of laws. As a consequence, society changed but law did not, and this caused problems.

Hanna discussed areas in which recent scholarship is reconsidering this paradigm. On the one hand, this was being done by specialists of Islamic law, such as Wael Hallaq, who questioned the basic premise that Islamic law stopped developing after the 9th and 10th centuries. Hallaq covered the ensuing two or three centuries, however, his work did not go into the later centuries. On the other hand, there was a significant contribution to this debate by historians, whose research was not on the law but on its application; they made extensive use of court records which included the decisions of qadis, based on Islamic law. She cited as an example the work of Professor Engin Akarli. These records, available for the most part as of the 16th century, exist in most cities of the Ottoman Empire, except in parts of North Africa where they have not survived. In Egypt, Anatolia, Greece, Cyprus, and Yugoslavia, they exist, ranging from about the 1520s to the mid-19th century. These records contain information on property, artisans, contracts, family law and other matters, providing material for social, economic, cultural history and other areas, including the history of jurisprudence.

Hanna mentioned that they could also be useful for writing legal history, and specifically, on the way that the law was applied and on the development of the legal system. An appointed Islamic jurist had to apply the law within the framework of his adopted school of law, but in practice, there is a lot of work to be done in order to see if this was strictly done.

Historians have now entered the field of legal history. The questions that they ask differ from legal scholars’ questions, and they use a different methodology. For historians, an important question concerned the relationship between the law and its implementation. Although these two sets of scholars are interested in the same subject, communication between them is not always easy, since historians may not keep up with the scholarly literature written by scholars of jurisprudence or even at times understand the technicalities of this literature. A legal scholar, on the other hand, does not usually dwell on issues related to the historical context in which the jurist operated, his or her social background and origins, but a historian does ask such questions. A reciprocity between these types of inquiry would help to advance the field.

The court records, which have been a basic source for historians in many parts of the Ottoman Empire, date roughly from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Thus, as far as the implementation of the law by the qadi is concerned, there is a lot of material to work on. However, the same is not true of the scholarly writings of this same period. In fact, many of the works written during those centuries, have remained ignored as sources even though the volume of writings is enormous. This means that historians cannot make a correspondence between the work of jurists and the decisions of qadis to see if they mutually influenced each other. Hallaq’s work unfortunately stopped before the 16th century. Many have assumed that these works of jurisprudence were merely repeating what went before, based on the twin notions of taqlid (imitation) and decline. Before accepting such a conclusion, they need to be compared with the earlier, classical works.

Thus, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to fully understand the directions in which the law and its application developed.

Andrew Newman Presentation Summary

Among the several ongoing conferences on empires, this is the more interesting forum because it takes on empires but also seeks to engage public perceptions about them and wider Muslim society. Newman drew attention to the abstract and esoteric nature of the law as well as its objective aspect. Perhaps the study of the Islamic law in western languages has played a role in the legacy of the decline paradigm. Newman addressed the decline of Twelver Shi’ism and its decline in legal development in particular.

Building on Prof. Hanna’s discussion of the early history of Islamic law and traditional views in which it was mired, there are many books from the 1970s written trying to figure out what Muslims were doing, with publications by Gibb, Schacht, Colson, and Hodgson himself working as an earlier generation of scholars. Wael Hallaq, despite the value of his work, missed the larger opportunity to challenge the role that was implicitly and explicitly ascribed to the closing of the door of ijtihad, a role at the heart of this forum. He did not address the issue of the larger decline. Newman argued that the law as a manifestation of culture was understood to be a marker that proved the broader, inherent lack of creativity within Islam in this period after the purported closing, to the point that this cultural marker set up the disaster of 1258 CE that ended the Golden Age.

Newman cited his work in Islamic medicine that witnesses a similar paradigm of a decline in creativity. Western scholars viewed Islamic medicine as consisting of dichotomous traditions—a pre-Islamic Hellenic tradition, and a prophetic tradition (tibb al-nabawi). These are said to have entered Islamic consciousness through the translation movement, carried through the twelfth century at the latest, and due to a lack of creativity in Islamic civilization, Islamic medicine is supposed to have been less and less interest in and effort to supplement Hellenic medicine. To struggle with the inherent lack of creativity. According to this notion, the prophetic medical tradition then took place of the fallen Hellenic tradition, which was viewed by western scholars as quackery. Thus the cultural dimensions of the socio-economic and political decline became evidence of the cultural decline, and vice versa.

As for the paradigm’s application to the Safavid Empire, there is a pre-1979 and a post-1979 understanding of “what went wrong” with the Safavids. Western Safavid studies have flourished since 1979, and an intimidating array of primary and secondary sources have become available, such as Persian court records, correspondence, waqf documents, material by contemporary western travelers written in French, English, German, and Polish. Safavid religious figures, those composing popular works wrote in Persian or Turkish, but most Shi’i scholars, whether resident in Iran or abroad, wrote in Arabic. Persian language alone is not enough to read this material. Then there is non-textual material, like monuments, coins, pottery, carpets added as aesthetic languages.

Efforts to encourage discussion among scholars of Safavid studies remain mostly in the pre-1979 rut. The paradigm of decline from that time still obtains, especially regarding the second Safavid century. The seventeenth century was the vital period, with Abbas as strong ruler in the role of the Great Man theory. The century is cast as ending in religious fanaticism, political and economic chaos. Scholars in sub-disciplines tend to take as given that the decline was inevitable already in 1722. . This periodization demarcates cultural matters as well, in alignment with the tendency cited earlier. Dating Safavid decline to this period is highly problematic, since most Persian language sources originated after the Safavid period. Contemporary accounts are not there. Western-language writings relied on western travelers of the period, but critical analysis of these sources is absent. Authors contradict each other and present as historical fact things gathered long after the events they portray. Political, religious, and commercial considerations render their material less than credible.

The recent focus on economic trends and data such as the movement of specie, silk, and other goods is encouraging but one-sided. From the 1970s, such studies tend to follow Wallerstein’s world-systems model, accepting the end of the Safavid Empire as a result of internal and external forces at face value. Legal scholars figure prominently in the 1258 version of the decline paradigm. Majlisi, the legal scholar, has his own paradigm, and without definite proof, Majlisi was vilified as the fanatical leader responsible for the persecution of Zoroastrians, and later writers bought into this. So Majlisi has his paradigm, and the Safavids have their own paradigm. From their inception in 1960s, Shi’i studies showed interest in the compatibility of Sufism and Shi’ism, based on research in some key Arabic texts. These studies included religious texts and brought in lots of other types of texts. Religious texts written over the last couple of centuries competed for attention with other, more accessible material.

The modernists raised issues about clerical authority, and scholars read Persian sources. The assumption of modernization theory had dictated, before 1979, that religion would go away. After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, a paradigm shift seemed in order, but none was forthcoming. The idea gained currency that genuine Shi’ism was really closest to Sufism, putting Majlisi at the head of this hierarchy that placed itself at the head of Safavid society. According to this line of thinking, real Shi’ism is characterized by antipathy to political power. Extrapolated to the present, i.e. to Khomeini, others argued again that Shi’ism was otherworldly, and therefore the establishment of the faith in Safavid Iran could be dated to the rise of the doctors of the law, whose self-promotion was defined by the Imams. Jurists and theologians took the place of the Imam, personalized the Imamate as an ideology. This forum is no time to argue the merits of the case. More important, stated Newman, is the question of the implications of this line of thinking. When religion gets out of the box, in other words, disasters like 1722 happen. We seem to be writing the past and the present at the same time.

Ottomanists have long abandoned the idea of decline, but scholars of the Safavids are still rushing headlong into it. In Hodgson’s third volume, the Safavids are addressed first. Majlisi made his customary appearance, as a dogmatic figure, impugning Safavid religious scholars as having taken over in the absence of any strong hand. It isn’t up to historians to adjudicate disputes among disciplines, but Newman declared that they could do better.

Calling to mind the argument about the dominant paradigm, Newman stated that debates over law and jurisprudence should really have little influence historically. The essentialist argument before 1979 got new life after 1979. There was popular and academic dissatisfaction with the religious flavor of the revolution. Then as now, religion was implicated in the decline. Peter Gran said that deconstructing is easy, but reconstructing is much harder. Newman finds that biography may be the key to recreating and contextualizing the life of one person, in order to look at influences, at the preexisting legacy, the challenges the person faced, and the world in which they lived. A sound biography would help to contextualize the Shi’i scholar Majlisi, for example. Newman related that he has tried to make a negative argument in this manner, to refute contentions surrounding Majlisi.

Newman called for academics to get away from any essentialist readings. Although the law was codified by the literate few, others had something to say about it, and people from below did occasionally topple some officials. Newman seeks a methodology for recovering that popular view, as in subaltern studies, which are mostly applied to the modern period, not at all to religious material. Study of religious material to look for dissent and disagreement may offer an indirect way to find it, as E. P. Thompson found that you can use legal and religious material as a means to recover voices of non-literates and non-elites. Such an approach might be applicable to working on Sufis, uncovering evidence of conflict and disagreement. Interesting Ideas from outside our field, imaginative uses of existing sources, stepping back to admit pre-conditioned ideas. Newman advocated identifying the conventional and heading 180 degrees in the opposite direction. The truth is out there. And it is really much more interesting than the worn-out paradigm.

Engin Akarli, Brown University

Nelly Hanna, American University, Cairo

Andrew Newman, University of Edinburgh

Engin Akarli Presentation Summary

Prof. Akarli spoke of decline after 1300, another form of decline after Suleyman, Abbas, and Akbar, and the reasons for decline as a concept and a discourse that developed in Europe and is relevant to and concerned with developments in northwestern Europe. According to that concept, Islam’s function was to pass along the intellectual link to the Greeks, and once the Muslims did that, their role ended. Another form of the decline paradigm emphasized a return to an imagined, pure state of civilization, in this case a pure form of Islam. The rest of history represents a departure from that pure state. Yet another form of decline related to the concept of the nation-state, in the sense that the development of history as a discipline is also a function of the 19th century and a servant of the nation-state—history serving to create a sense of nationality, of belonging. A convergence between centers of historical knowledge production in Europe with nationalists in the Muslim regions who were also creating such centers.

Akarli stated that addressing both decline paradigms must involve distinguishing between these various aspects in order to transcend these paradigms and write better histories. Because these paradigms rely on a dichotomy between East and West, on a polarity between Christianity and Islam, and because the concept of Western Civilization relies on the world-class notion of Enlightenment. More recently, the concept of a Judeo-Christian side of the polarity has developed, added to the earlier polarity that excluded Judaism.

Akarli noted the connection with Sisman’s paper in that the three empires were not “Islamic” in the sense that they were not majority Muslim polities. With the exception of the Safavid empire, most were not majority Muslim, even in the capital cities. We forget that the Ottoman empire became majority Muslim sometime in the middle of the 19th century, only after shedding some territory. This is a very important dimension in understanding Islamic law. When scholars talk about Islamic law, people assume it means a law for Muslims, not for non-Muslims. Non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman are supposed to have been oppressed, according to this narrative, and only recovered a history after they broke free of the Ottoman empire in the 19th century. The clearest expression of this Orientalist discourse is the statement by Lord Cromer; “If Islam changes, it is no longer Islam.”

In discussing the first aspect of decline noted above, it is necessary to consider that the origins of the Ottoman empire are said to lie in Anatolia around 1300 CE, yet the Ottomans who built an enduring empire entered Anatolia in 1071 CE. About 3008 years later the Ottomans established the proto-empire. Historians need to ask, like Gabor Agoston for the later period, “What happened during those 300 years?” During that time, they must have established networks and formations on which they were able to build a stable society, and one that included people who did not share the same religion.

The focus on law offers a window on the complex relationships that make up society. It sheds light on various fields of force in society, including cultural norms and values held by different social groups. Law is important in perpetuating a regime’s legitimacy by providing society with a sense of order. Study of Ottoman legal practice should provide insights into the longevity of the Ottoman state, and obliges historians to include law in the broad picture of Ottoman history.

Akarli’s central contention was that the Ottoman empire could not have survived as long as it did without engendering a sense of justice and legitimacy among the people, a sense of order among both Muslims and non-Muslims. The Ottomans adopted Islamic legal traditions and built a legal system on that model from the very beginning. Unlike many scholars in both East and West, however, we should not presume a priori that the Ottoman legal system was meant only for Muslims, merely because of its Islamic origins. The Ottoman courts were open to all members of the state in all matters, and they were the only channel for some matters. Scholars are wrong in asserting that because non-Muslims took their cases the Ottoman courts, it means they had no autonomy. Islamic law did not preclude the existence of various levels of the courts. In certain matters other religious groups had their autonomy. In certain issues—even where there was autonomy—they could come to the courts and not be turned away. These state courts had to hear the cases.

Examining the sources of legal history is essential to bringing new information on the past to light. Ottoman legal sources are rich but thinly mined, and need scholars trained to use and make sense of them. The records of the shari’ah courts when they were the backbone of the system contain registered agreements, that are important because they precluded future disputes. There is a huge amount of this material in notary public registers of shari’ah courts. Summaries of settled cases are not enough. There are judicial files of the imperial court, cases heard by the two Chief Judges of the Council, a high court. Court case contain the whole history of the cases (Diwan Muhimme). Legally relevant decisions of the government include imperial edicts, decrees, advisory legal opinions (fatawa), individual fatwas from Ottoman period. Materials related to legal training of jurists and bureaucrats was also important. Handbooks and guides for judges were used in the colleges. Controversies such as Himmet Taskomur studies, engendered commentaries and super-commentaries, other writings of jurists and legal specialists. Manuscripts related to political ethics and history sometimes contain specific information on their relation to the fiqh tradition. Such literature was also written in languages spoken in the Ottoman Empire, including Greek and Arabic, mostly written by Christian Arabs. The Greek Orthodox Church has such documents, and synagogues have them as well.

The archives contain information on the judicial affairs of various communities that have not been examined before. There was a presumption that Muslims, Christians, Jews did not mingle, when in fact they did, and it would have been historically unsustainable if they had not. Alavis and Druze, other unorthodox Muslim communities have written on legal matters. Other literary and popular sources include Nasruddin jokes to mine for information about popular views of the qadis and rulers. One would hope that this rich material about legal history would be relevant to adjusting the old paradigms.

There is a presumption is that fiqh is Islamic law, and it is important, but , but the dialogue between court decisions and other activities in society is equally important. Study of Islamic law is changing, but still suffers from total incomprehension of how modern minds could incorporate religiosity in a legal setting. How could a world religion inspired by God and making constant reference to God have anything to do with our modern era. The companion assumption is of course that modern Western law never, ever had anything to do with religion. To the contrary, earlier versions of many states’ constitutions make reference to or directly quote the Bible, yet this is not taken into account, so that only Muslims persist in this antiquated thinking. Critical reading of these sources would enable us to understand these interconnected matters.

Nelly Hanna Presentation Summary

Prof. Hanna began with the question of decline in relation to Islamic law, stating that the paradigm of decline has been applied to its development in the Abbasid period in the 9th and 10th centuries, when it was articulated into the several schools of law. The traditional view, which has since been challenged by scholars (though it has been poorly absorbed among the public), was that was that following these two centuries, the door of ijtihad, or independent judgment was closed, and subsequently, Islamic law stopped developing to become an ossified, medieval, unchanging body of laws. As a consequence, society changed but law did not, and this caused problems.

Hanna discussed areas in which recent scholarship is reconsidering this paradigm. On the one hand, this was being done by specialists of Islamic law, such as Wael Hallaq, who questioned the basic premise that Islamic law stopped developing after the 9th and 10th centuries. Hallaq covered the ensuing two or three centuries, however, his work did not go into the later centuries. On the other hand, there was a significant contribution to this debate by historians, whose research was not on the law but on its application; they made extensive use of court records which included the decisions of qadis, based on Islamic law. She cited as an example the work of Professor Engin Akarli. These records, available for the most part as of the 16th century, exist in most cities of the Ottoman Empire, except in parts of North Africa where they have not survived. In Egypt, Anatolia, Greece, Cyprus, and Yugoslavia, they exist, ranging from about the 1520s to the mid-19th century. These records contain information on property, artisans, contracts, family law and other matters, providing material for social, economic, cultural history and other areas, including the history of jurisprudence.

Hanna mentioned that they could also be useful for writing legal history, and specifically, on the way that the law was applied and on the development of the legal system. An appointed Islamic jurist had to apply the law within the framework of his adopted school of law, but in practice, there is a lot of work to be done in order to see if this was strictly done.

Historians have now entered the field of legal history. The questions that they ask differ from legal scholars’ questions, and they use a different methodology. For historians, an important question concerned the relationship between the law and its implementation. Although these two sets of scholars are interested in the same subject, communication between them is not always easy, since historians may not keep up with the scholarly literature written by scholars of jurisprudence or even at times understand the technicalities of this literature. A legal scholar, on the other hand, does not usually dwell on issues related to the historical context in which the jurist operated, his or her social background and origins, but a historian does ask such questions. A reciprocity between these types of inquiry would help to advance the field.

The court records, which have been a basic source for historians in many parts of the Ottoman Empire, date roughly from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Thus, as far as the implementation of the law by the qadi is concerned, there is a lot of material to work on. However, the same is not true of the scholarly writings of this same period. In fact, many of the works written during those centuries, have remained ignored as sources even though the volume of writings is enormous. This means that historians cannot make a correspondence between the work of jurists and the decisions of qadis to see if they mutually influenced each other. Hallaq’s work unfortunately stopped before the 16th century. Many have assumed that these works of jurisprudence were merely repeating what went before, based on the twin notions of taqlid (imitation) and decline. Before accepting such a conclusion, they need to be compared with the earlier, classical works.

Thus, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to fully understand the directions in which the law and its application developed.

Andrew Newman Presentation Summary

Among the several ongoing conferences on empires, this is the more interesting forum because it takes on empires but also seeks to engage public perceptions about them and wider Muslim society. Newman drew attention to the abstract and esoteric nature of the law as well as its objective aspect. Perhaps the study of the Islamic law in western languages has played a role in the legacy of the decline paradigm. Newman addressed the decline of Twelver Shi’ism and its decline in legal development in particular.

Building on Prof. Hanna’s discussion of the early history of Islamic law and traditional views in which it was mired, there are many books from the 1970s written trying to figure out what Muslims were doing, with publications by Gibb, Schacht, Colson, and Hodgson himself working as an earlier generation of scholars. Wael Hallaq, despite the value of his work, missed the larger opportunity to challenge the role that was implicitly and explicitly ascribed to the closing of the door of ijtihad, a role at the heart of this forum. He did not address the issue of the larger decline. Newman argued that the law as a manifestation of culture was understood to be a marker that proved the broader, inherent lack of creativity within Islam in this period after the purported closing, to the point that this cultural marker set up the disaster of 1258 CE that ended the Golden Age.

Newman cited his work in Islamic medicine that witnesses a similar paradigm of a decline in creativity. Western scholars viewed Islamic medicine as consisting of dichotomous traditions—a pre-Islamic Hellenic tradition, and a prophetic tradition (tibb al-nabawi). These are said to have entered Islamic consciousness through the translation movement, carried through the twelfth century at the latest, and due to a lack of creativity in Islamic civilization, Islamic medicine is supposed to have been less and less interest in and effort to supplement Hellenic medicine. To struggle with the inherent lack of creativity. According to this notion, the prophetic medical tradition then took place of the fallen Hellenic tradition, which was viewed by western scholars as quackery. Thus the cultural dimensions of the socio-economic and political decline became evidence of the cultural decline, and vice versa.

As for the paradigm’s application to the Safavid Empire, there is a pre-1979 and a post-1979 understanding of “what went wrong” with the Safavids. Western Safavid studies have flourished since 1979, and an intimidating array of primary and secondary sources have become available, such as Persian court records, correspondence, waqf documents, material by contemporary western travelers written in French, English, German, and Polish. Safavid religious figures, those composing popular works wrote in Persian or Turkish, but most Shi’i scholars, whether resident in Iran or abroad, wrote in Arabic. Persian language alone is not enough to read this material. Then there is non-textual material, like monuments, coins, pottery, carpets added as aesthetic languages.

Efforts to encourage discussion among scholars of Safavid studies remain mostly in the pre-1979 rut. The paradigm of decline from that time still obtains, especially regarding the second Safavid century. The seventeenth century was the vital period, with Abbas as strong ruler in the role of the Great Man theory. The century is cast as ending in religious fanaticism, political and economic chaos. Scholars in sub-disciplines tend to take as given that the decline was inevitable already in 1722. . This periodization demarcates cultural matters as well, in alignment with the tendency cited earlier. Dating Safavid decline to this period is highly problematic, since most Persian language sources originated after the Safavid period. Contemporary accounts are not there. Western-language writings relied on western travelers of the period, but critical analysis of these sources is absent. Authors contradict each other and present as historical fact things gathered long after the events they portray. Political, religious, and commercial considerations render their material less than credible.

The recent focus on economic trends and data such as the movement of specie, silk, and other goods is encouraging but one-sided. From the 1970s, such studies tend to follow Wallerstein’s world-systems model, accepting the end of the Safavid Empire as a result of internal and external forces at face value. Legal scholars figure prominently in the 1258 version of the decline paradigm. Majlisi, the legal scholar, has his own paradigm, and without definite proof, Majlisi was vilified as the fanatical leader responsible for the persecution of Zoroastrians, and later writers bought into this. So Majlisi has his paradigm, and the Safavids have their own paradigm. From their inception in 1960s, Shi’i studies showed interest in the compatibility of Sufism and Shi’ism, based on research in some key Arabic texts. These studies included religious texts and brought in lots of other types of texts. Religious texts written over the last couple of centuries competed for attention with other, more accessible material.

The modernists raised issues about clerical authority, and scholars read Persian sources. The assumption of modernization theory had dictated, before 1979, that religion would go away. After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, a paradigm shift seemed in order, but none was forthcoming. The idea gained currency that genuine Shi’ism was really closest to Sufism, putting Majlisi at the head of this hierarchy that placed itself at the head of Safavid society. According to this line of thinking, real Shi’ism is characterized by antipathy to political power. Extrapolated to the present, i.e. to Khomeini, others argued again that Shi’ism was otherworldly, and therefore the establishment of the faith in Safavid Iran could be dated to the rise of the doctors of the law, whose self-promotion was defined by the Imams. Jurists and theologians took the place of the Imam, personalized the Imamate as an ideology. This forum is no time to argue the merits of the case. More important, stated Newman, is the question of the implications of this line of thinking. When religion gets out of the box, in other words, disasters like 1722 happen. We seem to be writing the past and the present at the same time.

Ottomanists have long abandoned the idea of decline, but scholars of the Safavids are still rushing headlong into it. In Hodgson’s third volume, the Safavids are addressed first. Majlisi made his customary appearance, as a dogmatic figure, impugning Safavid religious scholars as having taken over in the absence of any strong hand. It isn’t up to historians to adjudicate disputes among disciplines, but Newman declared that they could do better.

Calling to mind the argument about the dominant paradigm, Newman stated that debates over law and jurisprudence should really have little influence historically. The essentialist argument before 1979 got new life after 1979. There was popular and academic dissatisfaction with the religious flavor of the revolution. Then as now, religion was implicated in the decline. Peter Gran said that deconstructing is easy, but reconstructing is much harder. Newman finds that biography may be the key to recreating and contextualizing the life of one person, in order to look at influences, at the preexisting legacy, the challenges the person faced, and the world in which they lived. A sound biography would help to contextualize the Shi’i scholar Majlisi, for example. Newman related that he has tried to make a negative argument in this manner, to refute contentions surrounding Majlisi.

Newman called for academics to get away from any essentialist readings. Although the law was codified by the literate few, others had something to say about it, and people from below did occasionally topple some officials. Newman seeks a methodology for recovering that popular view, as in subaltern studies, which are mostly applied to the modern period, not at all to religious material. Study of religious material to look for dissent and disagreement may offer an indirect way to find it, as E. P. Thompson found that you can use legal and religious material as a means to recover voices of non-literates and non-elites. Such an approach might be applicable to working on Sufis, uncovering evidence of conflict and disagreement. Interesting Ideas from outside our field, imaginative uses of existing sources, stepping back to admit pre-conditioned ideas. Newman advocated identifying the conventional and heading 180 degrees in the opposite direction. The truth is out there. And it is really much more interesting than the worn-out paradigm.

George Saliba, Columbia University

Ahmed Rahim, University of Virginia

Nabil Matar, University of Minnesota

George Saliba, Presentation Summary

Prof. Saliba’s studies have gone far beyond golden age and decline, and have actually attempted to re-define the golden age of Islamic science. Some of his material is in the form of PowerPoint presentations because of the restrictions on illustrations in academic books, whereas it requires illustrations for understanding [see video links provided for animated illustrations of his talk]. Prof. Saliba presented his ideas on what exactly is meant by the golden age of Islamic astronomy on the level of planetary theories and on the level of very sophisticated mathematics. He spoke about the period mainly after the 12th century, which is the standard period when that decline is said to have set in. Prof. Saliba noted with reference to earlier panels that poor al-Ghazali gets murdered every time this subject is mentioned. He proposed to demonstrate that if there ever was such a negative effect on science, it definitely did not come from al-Ghazali. If it is necessary to point the finger at something, it would be more useful to revive the code word “colonialism” in order to explain the “decline.”

Prof. Saliba’s focus was on novelties and original ideas in astronomy after al-Ghazali. He began with a quote from an early 11th century, Andalusian text, showing that the continuation of work in astronomy was widespread and not a final, flickering flame. Saliba’s other examples were chosen to show the geographic and chronological range, illustrating that very vital activities were going on during this period, and not a few isolated cases.

The author of this Andalusian text [see image] is unknown, but information internal to the text indicates that he was a friend of al-Zarqali, around 1070 CE. The author of the text stated in Arabic that he was very cognizant that he was doing something new in astronomy but that he would provide the information in a separate text which he would call Kitab al-Istidrak, a book that Saliba does not possess, and thinks that it is lost. If it were ever found it would most likely re-emerge from one of the vast Turkish manuscript collections. The book is very important for in it the author declared that he was presenting something completely new in astronomy.

Ibn Haitham, a scientist living in Cairo, saw all sorts of problems with the Ptolemaic tradition of the Greeks. He wrote that a good number of the Greek theories do not make cosmological sense, and that consequently, astronomers needed to look completely afresh at all of the issues in that Greek tradition; these scientific mistakes of the Greeks, he maintained, require a completely new look at the problem, since the mistakes in the Ptolemaic models could not be tolerated. In science, it is a significant statement that there is a need to start a whole new science afresh. This statement by Ibn Haitham was written at the beginning or the middle of the 11th century.

Ibn Haitham was talking specifically about the following phenomenon: from the Greek tradition we inherited a geometric configuration proposed originally by Ptolemy (d.c. 170) who in turn based on the cosmology of Aristotle depicting the manner in which the planets move around us, and in the diagram you have over here [indicates slide with diagram], Ptolemy tells us that for an observer sitting here on earth, the planet is fixed on a small sphere that is rotating, and this small sphere itself is in turn carried within this light blue sphere, and this light blue sphere should, by Ptolemy’s definition, run uniformly in place so that everything is in uniform motion, so that from the earth we will see this planet looping around. This is the phenomenon that we see, except that Ptolemy, the interpreter of Aristotle, tells us that this light blue sphere does not run on an axis that goes through the earth, nor does it run on an axis that goes through its center, but on an axis called the “equant” which is off center. Yet Ptolemy still says that it needs to run in place, at uniform speed, on an axis that does not go through its center. The animation of a basketball spinning on the finger of a basketball player [indicates images] which was acquired through the help of Dr. Al-Hassani [in the audience], demonstrates what happens [when the ball drops when it is no longer spinning on an axis through its center]. The minute the finger moves away, the whole Aristotelian universe collapses. Astronomers who read this description of Ptolemy said this is impossible. No physical sphere can actually do that. Hence, Ptolemy was not describing a real world, but an imaginary, ideal one. Hence, Ibn Haitham’s statement that we must look afresh at the whole of Aristotle’s and Ptolemy’s explanation, meant that astronomers of his age should junk this astronomy and start over. Scientific advance is just that—when there is a need to start over, because the inherited explanation is no longer good enough.

In response to all of those doubts and cosmological failings, a series of astronomers living and reading during the so-called age of decline produced what Prof. Saliba called a veritable golden age of astronomy. His examples, distributed geographically and chronologically, show that these developments were not a flash in the pan, or a last gasp, but part of a sustained creative effort. Modern scholarship has to get out of this kind of paradigm of decline and look at what these figures actually said, and re-assess their impact on astronomy as a science.

Prof. Saliba highlighted six astronomers and gave examples from their original work: Muayyad al-Din al-‘Urdi of Damascus, d. 1266; Nasir al-Din a Tusi, d. 1274; Qutb al-Din al-shirazi, d. 1311; Ibn Shatir, d. 1375; Ala’ al-Din al-Qushji, d. 1474; Shams al-Din al-Khafri, d. 1550. That period was the limit of Prof. Saliba’s research, but it was not the end of material in the sources, which will require more time to research.

With the texts of Muayyad al-Din, the reader can find the novelty of his work in the middle of the text, when the author states that what scientists have learned about astronomy is not sufficient. He stated that he would introduce a new mathematical theorem, since then called ‘Urdi’s Lemma, that was naturally nowhere to be found in Greek astronomy. He stated that he needed this new mathematical tool in order to resolve the Greek mathematical problems. In the midst of this text, he proposed a theorem and explained its proof and provided an illustration. He was clearly talking about something new.

The next example was Muayyad al-Din’s employer, a man by the name of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi also read the text of Ptolemy, and when he reached the critical stage in Ptolemy’s text, he said, “Aqul, hadha kalaamun kharijun an al-sinaa‛a.” To state it politely, he was saying that this kind of speech was utter nonsense. He was speaking about the most important text in the entire Greek tradition here, but he said that in order to actually save Ptolemy from himself, he, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, must propose a new theorem. He proposed the theorem on the margin of the page, which is now referred to as the “Tusi Couple.” Here again with al-Tusi, we have a new mathematical idea that was being plugged in to achieve the solution of problems that the Greeks could not solve in Ptolemy’s day, nor had others achieved it down to al-Tusi’s day, thus his proposal of the new solution.

About ten years later, al-Tusi realized that this theorem was not trivial, and that it was worth developing further, because it was useful in many applications. We have the Arabic text in which he developed and gave the mathematical proof for it. Approximately 200-300 years later, this same proof appeared in a Latin text, but this time it was written by Copernicus (died 1543). So this novelty, when it came into the Islamic sources, was highly appreciated during the Renaissance in Europe, but unfortunately not by modern Arabs and Muslims, who seldom read this material.

This theorem that al-Tusi proposed is a simple theorem that Prof. Saliba explained with illustrated diagrams [see images]. He needed to produce linear motion as a result of two circular motions. This has all sorts of mechanical and geometrical implications, but it is very useful for astronomical research, and al-Tusi was the one who proposed this new theorem and he proved it as we have seen. The late Willy Hartner of Germany first noticed this proof and noted in particular that the Arabic text and Latin text are similar, in that wherever the Arabic text had alphabetic letters to designate geometric points, the identical corresponding Latin letters were used in the Latin text. (a, b, g, d, etc.) Hartner asserted that Copernicus had even reproduced the labels of the points on his diagram that al-Tusi had used before. If it had been his own original diagram, he could have put the letters in any order he pleased, but he committed to putting them in exactly the same positions as Tusi a couple of centuries earlier had done. Therefore, Copernicus must have been looking at the diagram of al-Tusi. There is other evidence that he was looking at [an existing] diagram, and that at times he didn’t fully understand those diagrams. For example, here [indicates the image] the Z in Arabic is transliterated as F in Latin, since the resemblance between Z and F in Arabic is very close and easy to confuse. There is also a Ptolemaic problem related to the planetary model of Mercury; it is a very difficult model and Ptolemy had proposed it in this fashion: while this audience is not made up of mathematicians or astronomers, one can observe the visual difference in the model. In this model, as the planet Mercury moves around, from the point of view of observers on earth, Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi showed how this planet Mercury should move with a sophisticated explanation. The late historian of science Edward Kennedy managed to translate the ideas of Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi into vectors, showing the sophisticated mathematics which Qutb a-Din envisioned Such work does not normally appear in an age of decline, but grows out of an ongoing discourse among scientists who work intensively on a problem, who have their heads on their shoulders and know how to use them to produce such sophisticated work.

The problem of the movement of the moon was another point of argument among astronomers. Ptolemy noticed the moon, carried on a little epicycle. When this sphere is at the time of conjunction, meaning when the moon is close to the sun and can’t be seen, or when it is at the time of full moon, the maximum variation between where the moon is supposed to be and where it is actually placed is only a variation of about 5 degrees, but when the moon is at a quarter, the variation of where it is supposed to be and where it actually is, is about 7. 5 degrees. Now an astronomer must account for such a variation between 5 degrees and 7.5 degrees in appearance. Ptolemy concocted the idea of bringing the whole epicycle closer to the earth so it would look bigger, like the effect observed when you put your hand in front of your face so you can’t see the wall (even though the wall is obviously larger), because your hand is closer than the wall. This was an elegant solution because it allowed Ptolemy to account for the difference, except that he omitted to account for the fact that when you bring something closer, its own size will have to look bigger. If the moon is brought half way toward the observer than it should look twice as big. So Ibn Shatir of Damascus commented on that flaw, saying, “I have never seen the moon look twice as big when it is at ¼. Therefore we need a new mathematics for this.” And that is what he proposes: We can account for all the variations that Ptolemy is worried about, but then I can arrange the spheres that carry the moon in such a fashion that here it will be max 5 degrees, but when I bring it to 90 degrees, I can account for the longitude of the moon, and account for what is observed, but the size of the moon will be constant. Thus Ibn Shatir solved this problem. Copernicus offered exactly the same solution as Ibn Shatir, sphere for sphere, angle for angle. So today, historians of science are entitled to ask if Copernicus knew about the works of Ibn Shatir. Such a mathematical solution is not accidental. It must be constructed and accounted for with proofs.

Ibn Shatir was also unhappy with the Mercury model discussed earlier. So he proposed a new model for Mercury, Copernicus also adopted this model, but he made a mistake. Copernicus [referring to the image] tells us that the orbit of Mercury when it is 90 degrees away from its apogee is bigger than the orbit of Mercury when it is 120 degrees away from the same apogee (image) because Copernicus, like Ptolemy before him, forgot to pay attention to the distance of the object. In the image which is drawn to scale in order to help understanding this point we can see the angle that surrounds the orbit of Mercury when Mercury is 120 degrees away from its apogee, is distincly larger than the angle that surrounds the orbit when Mercury is only 90 degrees away from the apogee. A smaller circle when brought closer to the observer will cast a larger angle which is in the blue shown here. A larger circle that Copernicus thought was the real size, when it is farther away from the observer will have a smaller angle [points to the smaller red angle] than the blue as shown. So Copernicus introduced this confusion, when he said that the orbit of Mercury when it is ca 90 degrees away from the apogee is at its largest. Swerdlov, who edited Copernicus’ work, said that Copernicus did not apparently know how the model worked. Historians of science are entitled to ask (1) whether someone could invent a model that he doesn’t fully understand it himself, and (2) is it possible that he relied upon a model already invented by Ibn Shatir, one that Ibn Shatir himself had explained in great detail, while Copernicus did not fully understand.

In the last example of this presentation, there was Ala’ al-Din al-Qushji, who was not satisfied with these constructions of the orbit of Mercury, and who introduced a new mathematical model. There are two more examples. Shams al-Din, who is almost unknown to historians of science, wrote commentaries on Nasir al-din al-Tusi. The title of his book is The Solution of All the Problems That Have Passed Before And Could Not Be Solved. Shamsuddin discovered that the models that have gone before are mathematical descriptions of what we observe, and claimed that he could create new mathematical models to account for these things. He created four new models for the motion of Mercury, and said that one of them was in fact the work of al-Qushji. To sum up these models and prove that they are all identical, he provided the combination of all of them, and showed that they all predicted the same motion. So what was Shams al-Din al-Khafri doing in the middle of the 16th century? He was very aware of the explanatory power of mathematics, but realized in a very modern way, that mathematics was not a physical science, so ideal mathematical solutions don’t exist. They are merely possible explanations. Just as a phenomenon can be described in poetry, in prose, in English, French so it can be described in mathematics—which is just another language. This idea, Prof. Saliba claimed, is the epitome of originality. He understood the function of mathematics in science, with the quality that physical phenomena can be described correctly with mathematics in various ways.

Ahmed Rahim, Presentation Summary

In lieu of a presentation summary, the following article serves as an overview of the argument presented in brief at the Forum: "Avicenna's Immediate Disciples: Their Lives and Works," in Avicenna and His Legacy: A Golden Age of Science and Philosophy, ed. Y.T. Langermann (Turnhout, Belgium, 2009). Download here

Nabil Matar, Presentation Summary

George Saliba, Columbia University

Ahmed Rahim, University of Virginia

Nabil Matar, University of Minnesota

George Saliba, Presentation Summary

Prof. Saliba’s studies have gone far beyond golden age and decline, and have actually attempted to re-define the golden age of Islamic science. Some of his material is in the form of PowerPoint presentations because of the restrictions on illustrations in academic books, whereas it requires illustrations for understanding [see video links provided for animated illustrations of his talk]. Prof. Saliba presented his ideas on what exactly is meant by the golden age of Islamic astronomy on the level of planetary theories and on the level of very sophisticated mathematics. He spoke about the period mainly after the 12th century, which is the standard period when that decline is said to have set in. Prof. Saliba noted with reference to earlier panels that poor al-Ghazali gets murdered every time this subject is mentioned. He proposed to demonstrate that if there ever was such a negative effect on science, it definitely did not come from al-Ghazali. If it is necessary to point the finger at something, it would be more useful to revive the code word “colonialism” in order to explain the “decline.”

Prof. Saliba’s focus was on novelties and original ideas in astronomy after al-Ghazali. He began with a quote from an early 11th century, Andalusian text, showing that the continuation of work in astronomy was widespread and not a final, flickering flame. Saliba’s other examples were chosen to show the geographic and chronological range, illustrating that very vital activities were going on during this period, and not a few isolated cases.

The author of this Andalusian text [see image] is unknown, but information internal to the text indicates that he was a friend of al-Zarqali, around 1070 CE. The author of the text stated in Arabic that he was very cognizant that he was doing something new in astronomy but that he would provide the information in a separate text which he would call Kitab al-Istidrak, a book that Saliba does not possess, and thinks that it is lost. If it were ever found it would most likely re-emerge from one of the vast Turkish manuscript collections. The book is very important for in it the author declared that he was presenting something completely new in astronomy.

Ibn Haitham, a scientist living in Cairo, saw all sorts of problems with the Ptolemaic tradition of the Greeks. He wrote that a good number of the Greek theories do not make cosmological sense, and that consequently, astronomers needed to look completely afresh at all of the issues in that Greek tradition; these scientific mistakes of the Greeks, he maintained, require a completely new look at the problem, since the mistakes in the Ptolemaic models could not be tolerated. In science, it is a significant statement that there is a need to start a whole new science afresh. This statement by Ibn Haitham was written at the beginning or the middle of the 11th century.

Ibn Haitham was talking specifically about the following phenomenon: from the Greek tradition we inherited a geometric configuration proposed originally by Ptolemy (d.c. 170) who in turn based on the cosmology of Aristotle depicting the manner in which the planets move around us, and in the diagram you have over here [indicates slide with diagram], Ptolemy tells us that for an observer sitting here on earth, the planet is fixed on a small sphere that is rotating, and this small sphere itself is in turn carried within this light blue sphere, and this light blue sphere should, by Ptolemy’s definition, run uniformly in place so that everything is in uniform motion, so that from the earth we will see this planet looping around. This is the phenomenon that we see, except that Ptolemy, the interpreter of Aristotle, tells us that this light blue sphere does not run on an axis that goes through the earth, nor does it run on an axis that goes through its center, but on an axis called the “equant” which is off center. Yet Ptolemy still says that it needs to run in place, at uniform speed, on an axis that does not go through its center. The animation of a basketball spinning on the finger of a basketball player [indicates images] which was acquired through the help of Dr. Al-Hassani [in the audience], demonstrates what happens [when the ball drops when it is no longer spinning on an axis through its center]. The minute the finger moves away, the whole Aristotelian universe collapses. Astronomers who read this description of Ptolemy said this is impossible. No physical sphere can actually do that. Hence, Ptolemy was not describing a real world, but an imaginary, ideal one. Hence, Ibn Haitham’s statement that we must look afresh at the whole of Aristotle’s and Ptolemy’s explanation, meant that astronomers of his age should junk this astronomy and start over. Scientific advance is just that—when there is a need to start over, because the inherited explanation is no longer good enough.

In response to all of those doubts and cosmological failings, a series of astronomers living and reading during the so-called age of decline produced what Prof. Saliba called a veritable golden age of astronomy. His examples, distributed geographically and chronologically, show that these developments were not a flash in the pan, or a last gasp, but part of a sustained creative effort. Modern scholarship has to get out of this kind of paradigm of decline and look at what these figures actually said, and re-assess their impact on astronomy as a science.

Prof. Saliba highlighted six astronomers and gave examples from their original work: Muayyad al-Din al-‘Urdi of Damascus, d. 1266; Nasir al-Din a Tusi, d. 1274; Qutb al-Din al-shirazi, d. 1311; Ibn Shatir, d. 1375; Ala’ al-Din al-Qushji, d. 1474; Shams al-Din al-Khafri, d. 1550. That period was the limit of Prof. Saliba’s research, but it was not the end of material in the sources, which will require more time to research.

With the texts of Muayyad al-Din, the reader can find the novelty of his work in the middle of the text, when the author states that what scientists have learned about astronomy is not sufficient. He stated that he would introduce a new mathematical theorem, since then called ‘Urdi’s Lemma, that was naturally nowhere to be found in Greek astronomy. He stated that he needed this new mathematical tool in order to resolve the Greek mathematical problems. In the midst of this text, he proposed a theorem and explained its proof and provided an illustration. He was clearly talking about something new.

The next example was Muayyad al-Din’s employer, a man by the name of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi also read the text of Ptolemy, and when he reached the critical stage in Ptolemy’s text, he said, “Aqul, hadha kalaamun kharijun an al-sinaa‛a.” To state it politely, he was saying that this kind of speech was utter nonsense. He was speaking about the most important text in the entire Greek tradition here, but he said that in order to actually save Ptolemy from himself, he, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, must propose a new theorem. He proposed the theorem on the margin of the page, which is now referred to as the “Tusi Couple.” Here again with al-Tusi, we have a new mathematical idea that was being plugged in to achieve the solution of problems that the Greeks could not solve in Ptolemy’s day, nor had others achieved it down to al-Tusi’s day, thus his proposal of the new solution.

About ten years later, al-Tusi realized that this theorem was not trivial, and that it was worth developing further, because it was useful in many applications. We have the Arabic text in which he developed and gave the mathematical proof for it. Approximately 200-300 years later, this same proof appeared in a Latin text, but this time it was written by Copernicus (died 1543). So this novelty, when it came into the Islamic sources, was highly appreciated during the Renaissance in Europe, but unfortunately not by modern Arabs and Muslims, who seldom read this material.

This theorem that al-Tusi proposed is a simple theorem that Prof. Saliba explained with illustrated diagrams [see images]. He needed to produce linear motion as a result of two circular motions. This has all sorts of mechanical and geometrical implications, but it is very useful for astronomical research, and al-Tusi was the one who proposed this new theorem and he proved it as we have seen. The late Willy Hartner of Germany first noticed this proof and noted in particular that the Arabic text and Latin text are similar, in that wherever the Arabic text had alphabetic letters to designate geometric points, the identical corresponding Latin letters were used in the Latin text. (a, b, g, d, etc.) Hartner asserted that Copernicus had even reproduced the labels of the points on his diagram that al-Tusi had used before. If it had been his own original diagram, he could have put the letters in any order he pleased, but he committed to putting them in exactly the same positions as Tusi a couple of centuries earlier had done. Therefore, Copernicus must have been looking at the diagram of al-Tusi. There is other evidence that he was looking at [an existing] diagram, and that at times he didn’t fully understand those diagrams. For example, here [indicates the image] the Z in Arabic is transliterated as F in Latin, since the resemblance between Z and F in Arabic is very close and easy to confuse. There is also a Ptolemaic problem related to the planetary model of Mercury; it is a very difficult model and Ptolemy had proposed it in this fashion: while this audience is not made up of mathematicians or astronomers, one can observe the visual difference in the model. In this model, as the planet Mercury moves around, from the point of view of observers on earth, Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi showed how this planet Mercury should move with a sophisticated explanation. The late historian of science Edward Kennedy managed to translate the ideas of Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi into vectors, showing the sophisticated mathematics which Qutb a-Din envisioned Such work does not normally appear in an age of decline, but grows out of an ongoing discourse among scientists who work intensively on a problem, who have their heads on their shoulders and know how to use them to produce such sophisticated work.

The problem of the movement of the moon was another point of argument among astronomers. Ptolemy noticed the moon, carried on a little epicycle. When this sphere is at the time of conjunction, meaning when the moon is close to the sun and can’t be seen, or when it is at the time of full moon, the maximum variation between where the moon is supposed to be and where it is actually placed is only a variation of about 5 degrees, but when the moon is at a quarter, the variation of where it is supposed to be and where it actually is, is about 7. 5 degrees. Now an astronomer must account for such a variation between 5 degrees and 7.5 degrees in appearance. Ptolemy concocted the idea of bringing the whole epicycle closer to the earth so it would look bigger, like the effect observed when you put your hand in front of your face so you can’t see the wall (even though the wall is obviously larger), because your hand is closer than the wall. This was an elegant solution because it allowed Ptolemy to account for the difference, except that he omitted to account for the fact that when you bring something closer, its own size will have to look bigger. If the moon is brought half way toward the observer than it should look twice as big. So Ibn Shatir of Damascus commented on that flaw, saying, “I have never seen the moon look twice as big when it is at ¼. Therefore we need a new mathematics for this.” And that is what he proposes: We can account for all the variations that Ptolemy is worried about, but then I can arrange the spheres that carry the moon in such a fashion that here it will be max 5 degrees, but when I bring it to 90 degrees, I can account for the longitude of the moon, and account for what is observed, but the size of the moon will be constant. Thus Ibn Shatir solved this problem. Copernicus offered exactly the same solution as Ibn Shatir, sphere for sphere, angle for angle. So today, historians of science are entitled to ask if Copernicus knew about the works of Ibn Shatir. Such a mathematical solution is not accidental. It must be constructed and accounted for with proofs.

Ibn Shatir was also unhappy with the Mercury model discussed earlier. So he proposed a new model for Mercury, Copernicus also adopted this model, but he made a mistake. Copernicus [referring to the image] tells us that the orbit of Mercury when it is 90 degrees away from its apogee is bigger than the orbit of Mercury when it is 120 degrees away from the same apogee (image) because Copernicus, like Ptolemy before him, forgot to pay attention to the distance of the object. In the image which is drawn to scale in order to help understanding this point we can see the angle that surrounds the orbit of Mercury when Mercury is 120 degrees away from its apogee, is distincly larger than the angle that surrounds the orbit when Mercury is only 90 degrees away from the apogee. A smaller circle when brought closer to the observer will cast a larger angle which is in the blue shown here. A larger circle that Copernicus thought was the real size, when it is farther away from the observer will have a smaller angle [points to the smaller red angle] than the blue as shown. So Copernicus introduced this confusion, when he said that the orbit of Mercury when it is ca 90 degrees away from the apogee is at its largest. Swerdlov, who edited Copernicus’ work, said that Copernicus did not apparently know how the model worked. Historians of science are entitled to ask (1) whether someone could invent a model that he doesn’t fully understand it himself, and (2) is it possible that he relied upon a model already invented by Ibn Shatir, one that Ibn Shatir himself had explained in great detail, while Copernicus did not fully understand.

In the last example of this presentation, there was Ala’ al-Din al-Qushji, who was not satisfied with these constructions of the orbit of Mercury, and who introduced a new mathematical model. There are two more examples. Shams al-Din, who is almost unknown to historians of science, wrote commentaries on Nasir al-din al-Tusi. The title of his book is The Solution of All the Problems That Have Passed Before And Could Not Be Solved. Shamsuddin discovered that the models that have gone before are mathematical descriptions of what we observe, and claimed that he could create new mathematical models to account for these things. He created four new models for the motion of Mercury, and said that one of them was in fact the work of al-Qushji. To sum up these models and prove that they are all identical, he provided the combination of all of them, and showed that they all predicted the same motion. So what was Shams al-Din al-Khafri doing in the middle of the 16th century? He was very aware of the explanatory power of mathematics, but realized in a very modern way, that mathematics was not a physical science, so ideal mathematical solutions don’t exist. They are merely possible explanations. Just as a phenomenon can be described in poetry, in prose, in English, French so it can be described in mathematics—which is just another language. This idea, Prof. Saliba claimed, is the epitome of originality. He understood the function of mathematics in science, with the quality that physical phenomena can be described correctly with mathematics in various ways.

Ahmed Rahim, Presentation Summary

In lieu of a presentation summary, the following article serves as an overview of the argument presented in brief at the Forum: "Avicenna's Immediate Disciples: Their Lives and Works," in Avicenna and His Legacy: A Golden Age of Science and Philosophy, ed. Y.T. Langermann (Turnhout, Belgium, 2009). Download here

Nabil Matar, Presentation Summary

Discussion led by John Voll and Richard Bulliet

Discussion Summary/Transcript

Discussion led by John Voll and Richard Bulliet

Discussion Summary/Transcript

Karagoz and Hacivat are traditional Turkish shadow puppet characters whose heritage stretches from ancient China to Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe over the centuries. Cliff Long of the Crescent Moon Theater began the evening with a slide show illustrating the long history of shadow puppetry and its characters. He then performed several scenes from traditional Hacivat and Karagoz stories.

It was held at the City of Fairfax Regional Library (Fairfax,VA) on March 28, 2012 as a public outreach program of the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies "Beyond Golden Age and Decline," a National Endowment for the Humanities 'Bridging Cultures' project.

Cliff Long is an anthropologist, puppeteer, historian, and entertainer. He has served as an historic interpreter and programs coordinator at a number of museums and cultural facilities across the country. Currently he teaches courses focusing on the cultures and traditions of the Old Silk Road at The Community of College of Baltimore County and Howard Community College in Maryland. Crescent Moon Karagoz Shadow Puppet Theater is Cliff's most recent endeavor.

The event was co-sponsored by Fairfax County Public Libraries.

Karagoz and Hacivat are traditional Turkish shadow puppet characters whose heritage stretches from ancient China to Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe over the centuries. Cliff Long of the Crescent Moon Theater began the evening with a slide show illustrating the long history of shadow puppetry and its characters. He then performed several scenes from traditional Hacivat and Karagoz stories.

It was held at the City of Fairfax Regional Library (Fairfax,VA) on March 28, 2012 as a public outreach program of the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies "Beyond Golden Age and Decline," a National Endowment for the Humanities 'Bridging Cultures' project.

Cliff Long is an anthropologist, puppeteer, historian, and entertainer. He has served as an historic interpreter and programs coordinator at a number of museums and cultural facilities across the country. Currently he teaches courses focusing on the cultures and traditions of the Old Silk Road at The Community of College of Baltimore County and Howard Community College in Maryland. Crescent Moon Karagoz Shadow Puppet Theater is Cliff's most recent endeavor.

The event was co-sponsored by Fairfax County Public Libraries.