Suchergebnisse

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.

Articles collected in Historicizing Sunni Islam in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1450–c. 1750 engage with the idea that "Sunnism" itself has a history and trace how particular Islamic genres – ranging from prayer manuals, heresiographies, creeds, hadith and fatwa collections, legal and theological treatises, and historiography to mosques and Sufi convents – developed and were reinterpreted in the Ottoman Empire between c. 1450 and c. 1750. The volume epitomizes the growing scholarly interest in historicizing Islamic discourses and practices of the post-classical era, which has heretofore been styled as a period of decline, reflecting critically on the concepts of 'tradition', 'orthodoxy' and 'orthopraxy' as they were conceived and debated in the context of building and maintaining the longest-lasting Muslim-ruled empire. Readership: All interested in the debates on Sunni Islam and in the politics of religion and confessionalism in the early modern Ottoman Empire and in "post-classical" Islamic history more generally.

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- List of Figures and Tables -- Acknowledgements -- Notes on Contributors -- 1. Introduction: Comparative Perspectives on Islamisation -- Part I Conversion and Islamisation: Theoretical Approaches -- 2. Global Patterns of Ruler Conversion to Islam and the Logic of Empirical Religiosity -- 3. Conversion out of Personal Principle: ʿAli b. Rabban al-Tabari (d. c. 860) and ʿAbdallah al-Tarjuman (d. c. 1430), Two Converts from Christianity to Islam -- 4. The Conversion Curve Revisited -- Part II The Early Islamic and Medieval Middle East -- 5. What Did Conversion to Islam Mean in Seventh-Century Arabia? -- 6. Zoroastrian Fire Temples and the Islamisation of Sacred Space in Early Islamic Iran -- 7. 'There Is No God But God': Islamisation and Religious Code-Switching, Eighth to Tenth Centuries -- 8. Islamisation in Medieval Anatolia -- 9. Islamisation in the Southern Levant after the End of Frankish Rule: Some General Considerations and a Short Case Study -- Part III The Muslim West -- 10. Conversion of the Berbers to Islam/Islamisation of the Berbers -- 11. The Islamisation of al-Andalus: Recent Studies and Debates -- Part IV Sub-Saharan Africa -- 12. The Oromo and the Historical Process of Islamisation in Ethiopia -- 13. The Archaeology of Islamisation in Sub-Saharan Africa -- Part V The Balkans -- 14. The Islamisation of Ottoman Bosnia: Myths and Matters -- 15. From Shahāda to 'Aqīda: Conversion to Islam, Catechisation and Sunnitisation in Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Rumeli -- Part VI Central Asia -- 16. Islamisation on the Iranian Periphery: Nasir-i Khusraw and Ismailism in Badakhshan -- 17. Khwaja Ahmad Yasavi as an Islamising Saint: Rethinking the Role of Sufi s in the Islamisation of the Turks of Central Asia -- 18. The Role of the Domestic Sphere in the Islamisation of the Mongols -- Part VII South Asia -- 19. Reconsidering 'Conversion to Islam' in Indian History -- 20. Civilising the Savage: Myth, History and Persianisation in the Early Delhi Courts of South Asia -- Part VIII Southeast Asia and the Far East -- 21. China and the Rise of Islam on Java -- 22. The Story of Yusuf and Indonesia's Islamisation: A Work of Literature Plus -- 23. Persian Kings, Arab Conquerors and Malay Islam: Comparative Perspectives on the Place of Muslim Epics in the Islamisation of the Chams -- 24. Islamisation and Sinicisation: Inversions, Reversions and Alternate Versions of Islam in China -- Index