Books by Nir Shafir
The Order and Disorder of Communication: Pamphlets and Polemics in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire, 2024
The seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire was rife with polemical debate, around worshipping at sain... more The seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire was rife with polemical debate, around worshipping at saints' graves, medical procedures, smoking tobacco, and other everyday practices. Fueling these debates was a new form of writing—the pamphlet, a cheap, short, and mobile text that provided readers with simplified legal arguments. These pamphlets were more than simply a novel way to disseminate texts, they made a consequential shift in the way Ottoman subjects communicated. This book offers the first comprehensive look at a new communication order that flourished in seventeenth-century manuscript culture.
Through the example of the pamphlet, Nir Shafir investigates the political and cultural institutions used to navigate, regulate, and encourage the circulation of information in a society in which all books were copied by hand. He sketches an ecology of books, examining how books were produced, the movement of texts regulated, education administered, reading conducted, and publics cultivated. Pamphlets invited both the well and poorly educated to participate in public debates, thus expanding the Ottoman body politic. They also spurred an epidemic of fake authors and popular forms of reading. Thus, pamphlets became both the forum and the fuel for the polarization of Ottoman society. Based on years of research in Islamic manuscript libraries worldwide, this book illuminates a vibrant and evolving premodern manuscript culture.
Articles by Nir Shafir
Turcica, 2023
This is the introduction to a special issue on the "Social history of Ottoman languages." When hi... more This is the introduction to a special issue on the "Social history of Ottoman languages." When historians approach the political and social implications of language choice in the early modern Ottoman Empire, they treat it as either selecting a proto-nationalist affiliation just part of an indistinct premodern non-identity. This introduction introduces alternative theoretical and conceptual frameworks to approach the question of language in the early modern Ottoman Empire. This dossier/special issue itself is dedicated to the question of the social history of language in the early modern Ottoman Empire. It brings a small group of leading and budding scholars to help provide new insights into the language of the Ottoman Empire. In particular, it tries to demonstrate the diversity of languages in the Empire through essays on (pre-Ottoman) Turkish, Bosnian in the Arabic script, and Armenian.
Renaissance Quarterly, 2022
Although it is generally thought that Muslims paid little attention to pre-Islamic antiquity, the... more 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.
Oriente Moderno, 2021
The Phanariots-Grecophone Christian elites who ruled the Danubian principalities in the eighteent... more The Phanariots-Grecophone Christian elites who ruled the Danubian principalities in the eighteenth century-were the only non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire who claimed power by virtue of their command of the Turkish language. Why were they the rare exception and what does their story reveal about the ways in which power and language were intertwined in the early modern Ottoman Empire? The implicit power relations embedded in the Turkish language are rendered visible in a unique text written in 1731 in which Constantine Mavrocordatos, a Phanariot prince, attempted to school his younger brother in Turkish through a series of twelve, play-like dialogues. The dialogues did not aim to teach the formal grammar of Turkish but to demonstrate the power of speech by familiarizing the reader with the eloquent and witty repartee of Ottoman bureaucrats. Through an analysis of the text-which includes reestablishing its authorship and date of composition-the article examines the Phanariots' liminal position in Ottoman governance, especially in the newly ascendant imperial bureaucracy, through the prism of language. In doing so, it also rewrites the place of the Mavrocordatos family in the story of the Enlightenment in the Ottoman Empire.
Osmanlı Araştırmaları / Journal of Ottoman Studies, 2021
An extended review essay of Harun Küçük's book, Science without Leisure. It provides an alternati... more An extended review essay of Harun Küçük's book, Science without Leisure. It provides an alternative vision of the economics of the madrasa than that which Küçük suggests.
Islamic Law and Society, 2021
In the seventeenth century, Ottoman jurists repeatedly tried to stop Muslims from stating that th... more In the seventeenth century, Ottoman jurists repeatedly tried to stop Muslims from stating that they "belonged to the religion of Abraham." A century earlier, however, the expression had been a core part of the new confessional identity of the empire's Muslims. This article explores how the phrase changed from an attestation of faith to a sign of heresy through a study of a short pamphlet by Minḳārīzāde Yaḥyā Efendi. Minḳārīzāde argued that the use of the phrase is not permissible and addressed his arguments not to learned scholars, but to the semi-educated. I argue that Minḳārīzāde's pamphlet provides a glimpse into "vernacular legalism" in action in the Ottoman Empire, that is, how semi-educated audiences received and understood legal debates and subsequently turned law into a space of popular politics.
Historicizing Sunni Islam in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1450–c. 1750, 2020
In this article, I examine the revival of the medieval genre of heresiographies (milal wa niḥal) ... more In this article, I examine the revival of the medieval genre of heresiographies (milal wa niḥal) in the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I demonstrate how Ottoman authors revived the heresiography in response to the new threat of the Safavids in the sixteenth century. I then trace the reception of manuscripts in the seventeenth century to show how Ottoman readers then applied the heresiographies not against the empire’s enemies but its own population. In particular, I demonstrate a new methodology for understanding the reception of ideas and texts in the Ottoman Empire based on a mass analysis of codicological data.
History of Religions, 2020
In this article, I demonstrate how the hajj became a central devotional practice for all inhabita... more In this article, I demonstrate how the hajj became a central devotional practice for all inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire —Muslim and non-Muslim, Arabs and Rumis—between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The motor of this transformation was the new infrastructure of the hajj that linked Istanbul to Damascus to Mecca and Medina. This infrastructure both changed the hajj into a journey into a larger holy land but also brought Christians to Jerusalem in emulation of the Muslim hajj. In particular, I emphasize in this article how to think of empire as a network or assemblage of human and non-human actors which results unintentionally in forms of shared culture, like the hajj.
Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, 2020
This article is part of a roundtable titled “Chasing the Ottoman Early Modern,” (guest eds. Virgi... more This article is part of a roundtable titled “Chasing the Ottoman Early Modern,” (guest eds. Virginia Aksan, Boğac Ergene, and Antonis Hadjikyriacou), which brings together leading Ottomanists to comment on the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and global early modernity. Drawing on my research on the history of the book, I argue against the usage of early modernity in Ottoman history, not because early modernity cannot be global, but because it leads us down the path of narrativizing a largely arbitrary temporal rupture.
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2019
Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an immense body of morality literatur... more Over the course of 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.
A chapter from an edited volume devoted to the late seventeenth-century Damascene thinker, Abd al... more A chapter from an edited volume devoted to the late seventeenth-century Damascene thinker, Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi. This essay tackles his treatise on memory and forgetfulness and how to treat the latter. Full volume is _Early Modern Trends in Islamic Theology: ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī and his Network of Scholarship_, Lejla Demiri and Samuela Pagani (eds.), Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck (2018)
This a co-written article that looks at how digital tools and sources are changing the methods an... more This a co-written article that looks at how digital tools and sources are changing the methods and research conclusions of Ottoman history. Nir Shafir examines the impact of digital manuscript libraries on early modern intellectual history. Michael Polczysnki explains how GIS and other digital humanities tools can be used for visualization and analysis. Chris Gratien discusses how scholars can collaborate and publish using digital media and platforms.
Journal of Global History, Mar 15, 2014
In the 1870s, the American prison reformer E. C. Wines attempted to bring together representative... more 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.
Thesis Chapters by Nir Shafir
This is file contains the abstract, TOC, acknowledgements, and introduction of my dissertation.
Book Reviews by Nir Shafir
Translated into Hebrew from English thanks to Yoav Alon.
Reading Lists (Collaborative) by Nir Shafir
This is a collective experiment to create and update an ongoing bibliography on the history of sc... more This is a collective experiment to create and update an ongoing bibliography on the history of science and medicine in the modern and colonial Middle East. Please follow the link to the Google Doc below and feel free to add anything relevant that you wish.
Podcast by Nir Shafir
Uploads
Books by Nir Shafir
Through the example of the pamphlet, Nir Shafir investigates the political and cultural institutions used to navigate, regulate, and encourage the circulation of information in a society in which all books were copied by hand. He sketches an ecology of books, examining how books were produced, the movement of texts regulated, education administered, reading conducted, and publics cultivated. Pamphlets invited both the well and poorly educated to participate in public debates, thus expanding the Ottoman body politic. They also spurred an epidemic of fake authors and popular forms of reading. Thus, pamphlets became both the forum and the fuel for the polarization of Ottoman society. Based on years of research in Islamic manuscript libraries worldwide, this book illuminates a vibrant and evolving premodern manuscript culture.
Articles by Nir Shafir
Thesis Chapters by Nir Shafir
Book Reviews by Nir Shafir
Reading Lists (Collaborative) by Nir Shafir
Podcast by Nir Shafir
Through the example of the pamphlet, Nir Shafir investigates the political and cultural institutions used to navigate, regulate, and encourage the circulation of information in a society in which all books were copied by hand. He sketches an ecology of books, examining how books were produced, the movement of texts regulated, education administered, reading conducted, and publics cultivated. Pamphlets invited both the well and poorly educated to participate in public debates, thus expanding the Ottoman body politic. They also spurred an epidemic of fake authors and popular forms of reading. Thus, pamphlets became both the forum and the fuel for the polarization of Ottoman society. Based on years of research in Islamic manuscript libraries worldwide, this book illuminates a vibrant and evolving premodern manuscript culture.
All talks will occur at 12:00 PM PST.
Please be sure to register in order to attend via Zoom.
October 29: Jonathan Parkes Allen (Maryland): “The Many Makings of Martyrs in the Early Modern Ottoman World”
Registration Link: https://ucsd.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIqdOiurjkiH92Z2kAdxVXdCPzK-9b3qLHU
Nov. 6 (Friday): Sam Dolbee (Harvard): The Desert at the End of Empire: An Environmental History of the Armenian Genocide
Registration Link: https://ucsd.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0ocu6qqzgvGNFmGBpu6hXk72VaHlOW51kI
Nov. 12: Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano (Penn): Spaces of Poetry: Inhabiting Istanbul through Poetry after the Ottoman Conquest
Registration Link: https://ucsd.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIrcu2grz0uE9em-YehsCyaVzocrkCZM0_9
Nov. 19: Aslıhan Gürbüzel (McGill): Anti-Puritan Alliances in the Ottoman Empire and the Limits of State Religion
Registration Link: https://ucsd.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYqc--qpjotG9wMXszVbYHZmXxznUnXHM11
Dec. 3: Mary Elston (Harvard Law School): “Heritage (Turāth) in Modern Egypt: From Muḥammad ‘Abduh to Ali Gomaa”
Registration Link: https://ucsd.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUocOyvrzwvH9GfEy6Q9IwYuOvt-zz1HMWl
Dec 10: Ana Sekulic (European University Institute): Bosnia between Wilderness and Heavenly Gardens: The Making of Religious Belonging and Landscape in the Ottoman Empire
Registration Link: https://ucsd.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJItf-yhrTMjH931uVygEQ8vpkEKkxpxdq0R
http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2017/03/DamiettaNahda.html
In this interview we sit down with Peter Hill to talk about his research on intellectual transformation in the Arabophone world during the early 19th century. We explore the history of a translation circle of Syrian Christians in the Egyptian port of Damietta, who were actively translating Greek, Italian, and French Enlightenment texts into Arabic. Then we discuss the implications of these largely ignored works for the intellectual history of the Middle East and the dominant understanding of the Arabic Nahda.
Recorded with Nir Shafir and Shireen Hamza in Cambridge, MA.
CREDITS
Episode No. 270
Release Date: 19 September 2016
Recording Location: Paris, France
Editing and production by Chris Gratien
Images and bibliography courtesy of Lori Jones
Episode No. 268
Release Date: 9 September 2016
Recording Location: EHESS, Paris
Editing and production by Chris Gratien
The sessions will take place online. Register in advance:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMrcO6uqzIpHdcJJOA1FsDBx6VhXbgQjXqd