Inner-Islamic Transfer of Knowledge in the Ottoman Empire: on Translations of Works of Islamic Mysticism within Transregional Sufi Networks in the Anatolian and Arab Provinces

Tobias Sick
The research project seeks to analyse processes of translation and adaptation of works of Islamic mysticism written in the languages Persian, Arabic, and Turkish, which took place in various (border) regions of the Ottoman Empire during the 16th to 18th centuries. The focus of the project will be on the socio-cultural background of these processes, that is, the conditions underlying the selection, imitation, adaptation, transmission and reception of texts. The project will apply current approaches developed in the fields of material philology and translation studies in order to examine textual, paratextual, codicological, and visual aspects of manuscripts as well as the background of the translators themselves.
The analysis of the selected source material will allow insights into the socio-political fabric of Ottoman scholarly culture and book culture as well as networks of Sufi brotherhoods in the capital Istanbul and across the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and its borderlands with Iran. Thereby it will be possible to illuminate from a transregional perspective how actors coming from different cultural milieus adapted norms and representations to objects in a particular context.