Over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries an immense body of morality literature emerged in the Ottoman Empire as part of a widespread turn to piety. This article draws upon the anthropology of Islamic revival and secularism to reassess this literature's importance and propose a new view of the history of political thought in the empire. It does so through a close analysis of a fundamental concept of Ottoman political life: “naṣīḥat, ” or “advice.” Historians have used “advice books” to counter the presumption that the Ottoman Empire declined after the sixteenth century, but in doing so they have overlooked the concept's broader meaning as “morally corrective criticism.” I analyze two competing visions of naṣīḥat at the turn of the eighteenth century to reveal how the concept was deployed to politically transform the empire by reforming its subjects’ morality. One was a campaign by the chief jurist Feyżullah Efendi to educate every Muslim in the basic tenets of Islam. The other was a wildly popular “advice book” written by the poet Nābī to his son that both explicates a new moral code and declares the empire's government and institutions illegitimate. Both transformed politics by requiring that all subjects be responsible moral, and therefore political, actors. The pietistic turn, I argue, turned domestic spaces into political battlegrounds and ultimately created new, individualistic political subjectivities. This, though, requires challenging functionalist conceptions of the relationship between religion and politics and the secularist inclination among historians to relegate morality to the private sphere.
In the 1870s, the American prison reformer E. C. Wines attempted to bring together representatives from every country and colony in the world to discuss the administration and reform of the prison, under the auspices of the International Prison Congress. This article tackles the challenge by exploring how the international congress operated as both a social scientific technology and a diplomatic forum that emerged from this short-lived world of amateur social science and diplomacy. It argues that the exigencies of the international congress as a social scientific space forced it to take on diplomatic and political functions that both imprinted a logic of comparability onto the burgeoning international diplomatic system and also caused the eventual exclusion of non-European polities from the congresses. It engages with recent scholarship in history of science specifically to understand the international congress as a technology that mediated intellectual exchange and scientific communication. By examining the challenges posed by the inclusion of non-Western polities in such communication, it attempts to reveal the multiple global histories of the social sciences in the late nineteenth century.
This is the story of a holy land in the Middle East-but not the one you might expect. Cities like Jerusalem and Mecca might quickly come to mind, but Damascus was the key to the creation of an Ottoman holy land between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, because Damascus was the gateway to the hajj. As a recent flurry of museum exhibits reminds us, the hajj-that is, the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina-has been a well-established part of Muslim religiosity for centuries. 1 The Ottoman dynasty also celebrated the hajj's importance over the six centuries of its rule, even if no sultan personally undertook the journey. 2 Yet the hajj's aura of timeless sanctity also hinders I would like to thank Tijana Krstić and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on this article. In addition, the participants of the University of California Mediterranean Studies Workshop in 2015 provided valuable feedback on a very early draft of this article. Mina Moraitou of the Benaki Museum of Islamic Art provided very helpful information about items in the museum's collection and kindly supplied photographs of the objects. All translations are my own unless noted otherwise. The open-access status of this article has been funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 648498-OTTOCONFESSION). 1 See, e.g., Venetia Porter, ed., Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam (London: British Museum, 2012). 2 On the Ottoman administration of the hajj, see Suraiya Faroqhi, Pilgrims and Sultans: The Hajj under the Ottomans, 1517-1683 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1994). Sultan Osman II (r. 1618-22) apparently made plans to undertake the hajj in 1622. Contemporary observers, however, understood this desire as a pretext to raise a new army in Anatolia to counter his standing army, which opposed his grander ambitions of rule. His hajj was not realized as he was overthrown and killed shortly thereafter.
Although it is generally thought that Muslims paid little attention to pre-Islamic antiquity, the Damascene scholar ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī visited and described the Roman ruins of Baalbek twice, in 1689 and 1700. He interpreted the site, however, not as a temple but as a palace built by jinns for Solomon. Nābulusī was very likely aware of the site's Roman past but purposefully played with its historicity to highlight Syria's innate sanctity. His interpretation of Baalbek reveals an antiquarian project in the Ottoman Empire that was constructed along variant but parallel lines to the better known one in Renaissance Europe.
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