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The Road from Damascus: Circulation and the Redefinition of Islam in the Ottoman Empire, 1620-1720

Abstract

In the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Empire was marked by constant polemical disputes over Islamic religious practices. By the end of the century, these debates, which covered topics as varied as the permissibility of smoking tobacco or saint worship, had become so heated the many Muslims in the empire were willing to declare their co-religionists heretics. I use these polemical disputes as a setting in which to explore theories and approaches of religious transformation in the Islamic world. Rather than emphasize religious change driven by socio-economic forces or the disciplinary mechanisms of the state, I focus instead on how Islamic religiosity changed as it became increasingly entangled in the material world of the Eastern Mediterranean. I argue that intensified regimes of circulation of objects and people, especially between the Arabic and Turkish-speaking (Rumi) segments of the empire, were generative of key developments of Ottoman religiosity such as novel forms of reading and writing, a culture of pilgrimage centered on the hajj, and, indeed, the bitter polemicism itself. I do this through four detailed case studies of heresy, manuscript “pamphlets,” pilgrimage, and travelogues. The dissertation thus makes two contributions. The first is to integrate discussions of materiality and circulation into our understanding of the transformation of Islamic religiosity in the early modern Ottoman Empire. This is reflected not only in my analysis but also in my research method, in which the materiality of the manuscripts themselves helps me uncover unknown writers and topics and connect a myriad of unrelated works. The second contribution is to highlight how the sustained encounter, exchange, and connectivity between Rumis and Arabs became an important motor of religious and cultural change in the empire.

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