Projects 2017-2020 Working Group 2: Circulation of Knowledge
Ani Sargsian
From the 11th to the 19th century, Persian was an important and highly influential language of literature, education, and partly also of administration and diplomacy, in large parts of the „Eastern Islamic world“. The dynamics and dispersion of Persian as a language of literature, and a lingua franca, and its surprising vitality and continuity, have not yet been sufficiently studied. With Persian-Turkic dictionaries that were written in the Ottoman Empire of the first half of the 16th century, the project selects a well-defined group of primary sources to study the „life“ and development of Persian as a lingua franca, as an exemplary case study. By comparing the manuscript situation and by studying the prefaces and colophons of approximately 20 dictionaries, the project will address questions like the following: Did the authors of these dictionaries influence each other? In what ways did they interact? Were their works used in studying Persian? What do these dictionaries say about their reception? Regional specifics and the historical and religious context will be taken into account as factors that influence language use. By systematically exploiting an important group of primary sources, the project promises to also shed light on other, more general questions: What was the importance of Persian for the cultural identity of Ottoman poets? Did these consider Persian language and literature as part of a „cultural transfer“, or as an inalienable part of their own culture? Overall, the project promises to provide an important case study for a better understanding of Persian-Turkic cultural transfer.
Taisiya Leber
In Western and Central Europe the beginnings of printing meant important changes in the written culture and circulation of knowledge during the Early Modern era. In contrast, in the Ottoman Empire, manuscripts played a bigger role as a book-medium until the 18th century, especially for Muslim writings. However, printed books also circulated in the Ottoman Empire. They were produced by several printing houses founded among others in Constantinople (Jewish and Greek), Thessaloniki (Jewish), Goražde and Belgrade (Serbian) or imported from the big European centres of printing. It was the task of the Orthodox Church and the monasteries that possessed a high degree of autonomy and transregional contacts to preserve Byzantine written culture. The research project aims at examining the role of printed books in the circulation of knowledge within the Ottoman Empire, as well as the development of post-Byzantine networks between Orthodox patriarchates, bishoprics and monasteries that expanded far beyond Ottoman frontiers via Poland-Lithuania to Muscovy. Exchange within this region was particularly important in the post-Byzantine world, because of religious, cultural, political and ideological interdependencies that the project will examine from a transottoman perspective. The goal is to study printed books from the Ottoman area from the end of the 15th until the end the 17th century and to compare the forms and contexts of book production by different religious groups. Particular attention will be paid to the subject of the Byzantine heritage in the Ottoman Empire, as well as in Eastern Europe during the Early Modern period.
Barbara Henning and Necati Alkan
The project documents and maps out the complex semantic field which underlies discourses about establishing, negotiating and transgressing social boundaries in the Ottoman context, adopting a broad time frame that spans from the 16th to the early 19th century. Delving into the subject of social boundaries in the Ottoman world comes with the realisation that to merely translate modern and Western concepts is of limited use: The direct translation of “boundary“, the Ottoman term ḥadd, can indeed be encountered in the Ottoman sources. However, other notions, e.g. the idea of an involuntary mixing or mingling (iḫtilāṭ) when talking about social boundaries, need to be taken into account to do justice to the complexities and internal dynamics of the Ottoman discourse. For theoretical support, the project draws on the field of conceptual history: Ottoman notions of boundaries will be read as complex semantic configurations, whose specific genealogies and trajectories can be traced. Changes over time in meaning, strategies of translation and appropriations, as well as differences between various genres and contexts in Ottoman usage will be recorded to explore two key hypotheses: First, Ottoman semantics pertaining to sociocultural boundaries are subject to changes which are related to broader transformations within Ottoman society. Second, the Ottoman semantics under scrutiny here do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, they are products of continuous exchanges and transfers of knowledge, thus reflecting epistemological entanglements and shedding light on frameworks of interactions that extend beyond the territorial borders of the Ottoman Empire. In terms of source material, the project puts normative texts in conversation with sources describing individual and concrete instances of negotiations of social boundaries. Moments in which social boundaries are being discussed are tracked down in a wide variety of sources, including legal discourse, advice literature and fictional texts, with a geographical focus on the Ottoman provincial centres of Trabzon and Diyarbekir.
The study of Muslim modernities often focuses on leading figures in the cultural centres of the Islamic World. This project adopts a different perspective. It investigates modernisation discourses of European Muslims before World War I as transimperial processes of communication. Focusing on Russian Crimea and Habsburg Bosnia, it discusses the example of two regions that, unlike other areas of post-Ottoman Europe, were not affected by a process of radical de-Ottomanisation. Both Bosnian Muslims and Crimean Tatars maintained cultural and emotional bonds to other regions of the Ottoman Empire and to the old metropole Istanbul. This holds especially true for members of the elite, whose biographies were often marked by a high degree of mobility. The continuing transimperial networks played an important role in processes of cultural and social modernisation, during which patterns of modernity were not only taken over from the Imperial Russian or Habsburg rulers but transferred from the Ottoman Empire as well. Moreover, the analysis of the Bosnian Muslim and Crimean Tatar press before World War I demonstrates a keen interest in and a close observation of the Muslim brethren in other former borderlands of the Ottoman Empire. In some cases, research can even reconstruct direct processes of communication between Bosnian Muslims and Crimean Tatars. This project will concentrate on such processes. It asks how key concepts of the Muslim modernisation discourse were first negotiated in translocal communication processes and then translated into local contexts in order to get popularised. Interpreting the negotiation of modernity as a complex entanglement of communication, the project seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the making of Muslim modernities in general.
Eveline Dierauff
Together with the sub-project by Alexandra Gerykova, this project examines debates on collective identity among Jewish and Arab populations in Palestine around the turn of the 20th century. This sub-project investigates local concepts of collective identity, group relations as well as state and society building in Palestine in the years before, during and shortly after World War I. This was a period of rapid transformation from Ottoman imperial rule to the British Mandate and rising Palestinian-Arab nationalist aspirations. In several case studies, the project analyses how political concepts from various backgrounds were debated by intellectuals from the rising Palestinian middle class. As main sources the Arab press, diaries and other types of contemporary Palestinian literature will be examined. The Palestinian actors’ views were deeply shaped by concepts of modernity, the age of Ottoman reforms and the cosmopolitanism of a trans-Ottoman migration society in the Jerusalem and Jaffa regions. However, the most controversial discussions developed around the catastrophic events during the 1910s such as the Tripoli War (1911), the Balkan Wars (1912/13), the rise of the Arab Movement for Decentralization in 1913 and, finally, the end of the Ottoman regime during World War I that resulted in the establishment of new political structures by the colonial powers. As a consequence of the political crisis, rising concepts of nationalism began to replace former ideals of multi-confessional and multi-ethnic Ottoman unity.
One of the stipulations of the peace treaty of Jassy, which ended the Russo-Ottoman war of 1787–1792, was the exchange of diplomatic missions between St. Petersburg and Istanbul. Thus in January 1793, the Ottoman envoy Muṣṭafā Rāsiḫ Efendi embarked on his journey to the court of Catherine II. When he returned eighteen months later in July 1794, he presented Sultan Selīm III with two reports: one sefāretnāme (embassy report) written by his secretary Seyyid ʿAbdullah that described the delegation’s journey and diplomatic mission, and one ʿarīża (letter), which contained his own observations on Russian politics and society. These two texts are the main sources for the project. Apart from an annotated translation, the principal task is to establish what kind of information they provided to the Ottoman ruler and his counsellors. To this end, the texts have to be analysed within the framework of Ottoman embassy reports of the 18th century and against the backdrop of both Ottoman-Russian relations and the multicultural context in Istanbul at that time. To these Ottoman texts, the project adds the writings in Russian and German of members of the Russian delegation to Istanbul headed by General Mikhail Illarionovič Kutuzov, i.e. letters from the envoy to the empress and leading Russian statesmen and to his family as well as travel accounts by Heinrich Christoph von Reimers and Johann Christoph Struve. These three sets of texts, which have been subjected to little or no research to date, will be read in a comparative perspective and analysed with regard to their narrative strategies.
Albert Weber
The study aims at collecting quantitative data from diplomatic correspondences in order to determine at which stage the Central and Western European states became aware that Wallachia and Moldova changed sides to the Ottomans politically and militarily. This “Ottomanisation” meant that the Danube Principalities became Ottoman vassal states and that their elites were integrated into the Ottoman ruling system in South Eastern Europe. During the first half of the 15th century there existed a double, Hungarian-Ottoman vassalage of Wallachia and during the second half a Polish-Ottoman, while Moldova was a Hungarian vassal. The power relations within the region especially changed after the 1460s following the Ottoman conquest of Serbia (1459) and Bosnia (1463). Hungary withstood Ottoman expansion (Belgrade 1456, Bosnia 1476, Transylvania 1479) but did not have the financial and military means to shield the Principalities against growing Ottoman influence. The Wallachian and Moldovan elites therefore had to negotiate their positions towards the Ottomans and accepted the Hungarian or Polish suzerainty only symbolically. The study will investigate the strategies applied by the voivodes, the Wallachian and Moldovan rulers, to maintain their diplomatic access to their Catholic neighbours and their elite networks. It will also investigate the level of knowledge the latter states had about the situation in the Principalities.