Contested conversions to Islam: narratives of religious change in the early modern Ottoman empire
This book explores how Ottoman Muslims and Christians understood the phenomenon of conversion to Islam from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, when the Ottoman Empire was at the height of its power and conversions to Islam peaked. Because the Ottomans ruled over a large non-Muslim populatio...
| Résumé: | This book explores how Ottoman Muslims and Christians understood the phenomenon of conversion to Islam from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, when the Ottoman Empire was at the height of its power and conversions to Islam peaked. Because the Ottomans ruled over a large non-Muslim population and extended greater opportunities to convert than to native-born Muslims, conversion to Islam was a contentious subject for all communities, especially Muslims themselves. By producing narratives about conversion, Ottoman Muslim and Christian authors sought to define the boundaries and membership of their communities while promoting their own religious and political agendas. This book argues that the production and circulation of narratives about conversion to Islam was central to the articulation of Ottoman imperial identity and Sunni Muslims' “orthodoxy” in the long sixteenth century. Placing the evolution of Ottoman attitudes toward conversion and converts in the broader context of Mediterranean-wide religious trends and the Ottoman rivalry with the Habsburgs and Safavids, this book also introduces new sources, such as first-person conversion narratives and Orthodox Christian neomartyologies, to reveal the interplay of individual, (inter)communal, local, and imperial initiatives that influenced the process of conversion. Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Note on Transliteration and Pronunciation -- Introduction - Turning "Rumi": Conversion to Islam, Fashioning of the Ottoman Imperial Ideology, and Interconfessional Relations in the Early Modern Mediterranean Context -- Chapter One - Muslims through Narratives: Textual Repertoires of Fifteenth-Century Ottoman Islam and Formation of the Ottoman Interpretative Communities -- Chapter Two - Toward an Ottoman Rumi Identity: The Polemical Arena of Syncretism and the Debate on the Place of Converts in Fifteenth-Century Ottoman Polity -- Chapter Three - In Expectation of the Messiah: Interimperial Rivalry, Apocalypse, and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Muslim Polemical Narratives -- Chapter Four - Illuminated by the Light of Islam and the Glory of the Ottoman Sultanate: Self-Narratives of Conversion to Islam in the Age of Confessionalization -- Chapter Five - Between the Turban and the Papal Tiara: Orthodox Christian Neomartyrs and Their Impresarios in the Age of Confessionalization -- Chapter Six - Everyday Communal Politics of Coexistence and Orthodox Christian Martyrdom: A Dialogue of Sources and Gender Regimes in the Age of Confessionalization -- Conclusion - Conversion and Confessionalization in the Ottoman Empire: Considerations for Future Research -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index. |
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| ISBN: | 0804777853 |
| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.11126/stanford/9780804773171.001.0001 |