Workshops & Conferences by Şaban Ağalar
Middle East Studies Association 54th Annual Meeting, 2020
In my presentation, I will focus on the proliferation of historical and theological works devote... more In my presentation, I will focus on the proliferation of historical and theological works devoted to non-Muslim nations written in the period between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth century and how it is related to two interrelated intellectual endeavors: (1) to reformulate Muslim perceptions of religious others and (2) to reconceptualize the Islamic notion of religion/dīn against the background of growing knowledge about other faiths. By examining a revival in interconfessional themes, I will address the role of intensifying exposure to growing scholarly knowledge about non-Muslim faiths in these changing attitudes, and how this high level of exposure might have pushed Ottoman authors to reframe their conceptualization of other faiths.
AATT Graduate Student 16th Pre Conferance Program, 2021
In modern scholarship, which draws largely on anecdotal evidence, the term millet is usually rele... more In modern scholarship, which draws largely on anecdotal evidence, the term millet is usually relevant only insofar as it serves the broader discussions on the legal or organizational relations between the Ottoman government and the non-Muslim religious communities, an approach that reduces the Ottoman conceptions of millet into the imperial discourse. In exploring the conceptual history of millet beyond that framework, this paper integrates a computer-based distant reading approach with historical inquiry. I will utilize “Keywords in Context Search Tool” that I have developed on R Studio to list the most frequent neighboring words of millet in the Istanbul court records from the seventeenth century and Evliya Çelebi’s Seyāḥatnāme, which permits us to distinguish the contexts in which the two interconnected terms were used. What the computational analysis points out is a stark difference in the meanings attached to the term millet between imperial and non-imperial discourses. Braude’s claim that millet was primarily associated with non-Muslim religious communities within the empire appears to have been the case only for the official language given that in the court records the term mostly refers to the Muslim community. The most frequent neighboring words of millet in Seyāḥatnāme are exclusively terms that describe a non-Muslim religious community or their rituals. Evliya predominantly reserves millet for Christians, regardless of being Ottoman subjects. Moreover, Evliya’s conception of millet was substantially different from the court records that expand the category of millet to include ethic-regional groupings in a secular sense. The distinctive word choices when mentioning the Jews suggests that Muslim authors and scribes conceived them categorically different from other ethnic-geographical groups like Circassians or Georgians, far from being a direct counterpart of Muslim and Christian confessional corporates.
by Emin Lelić, B. Harun Küçük, Şaban Ağalar, Duygu Yildirim, Ayşe Baltacıoğlu-Brammer, Cornell Fleischer, Kameliya Atanasova, Ahmet Yusuf Yuksek, Burcak Ozludil, Pinar Odabasi Tasci, Ella Fratantuono, and Nikolay Antov
Papers by Şaban Ağalar
TALİD Türkiye Araştırmaları Literatür Dergisi, 2022
Since the early 1980s, literature on early modern Ottoman historiography witnessed a significant ... more Since the early 1980s, literature on early modern Ottoman historiography witnessed a significant expansion in tandem with the rising interest in narrative sources and archival documents. The research, especially during the last two decades, is characterized by the use of new sources and methodology, which in turn, enabled the examination of previously overlooked features and dynamics of early modern history writing. This review argues that the imprint of the new trajectories in the study of early modern Ottoman historiography is particularly manifest in two themes of research. First, the field has undergone a shift from an emphasis on the narrowly defined political function of history writing to the acknowledgment of the multiplicity of purposes, agents, and messages. Studies in the field of art history have particularly contributed to this transformation by expanding the repertoire of historiographical sources beyond textual materials and raising productive questions regarding the authorship and audience of official histories. Second, thought-provoking studies on seventeenth-and eighteenthcentury historiography challenged the conventional categories of historian and historiographical work. Historiographers who were neither bureaucrats nor scholars integrated otherwise marginalized voices into the study of Ottoman historiography. Despite the promising developments in the field, there is still a lack of research on the theoretical dimensions and cross-cultural connections of early modern Ottoman history writing.
Osmanlı Araştırmaları / The Journal of Ottoman Studies, 2022
Two Jewish converts to Islam in the service of Bayezid II penned the earliest known anti-Jewish p... more Two Jewish converts to Islam in the service of Bayezid II penned the earliest known anti-Jewish polemicals in the Ottoman Empire. This article aims at exploring the historical context of the two epistles and their connection with Islamic polemical literature. The simultaneous appearances of Abd al-Salam’s Risāla al-hādiya and Abd al-Allam’s Risāla al-ilzām al-Yahūd will be discussed in the context of the Sephardic influx to the Ottoman lands, an encounter that stimulated scholarly interest in the Jewish faith among Ottoman intellectuals. At first glance, the two treatises seem to be structured so as to persuade a Jewish audience to embrace the Muslim faith by abandoning their former religion. However, the choice of Arabic instead of Hebrew, and the circulation of the texts primarily among Muslim readers suggest that addressing the Jews appears to have been a rhetorical tactic. Considering the negative connotations attached to converts by the Ottoman elite, the authors might also have viewed the composition of anti-Jewish treatises as an effort to distance themselves from their Jewish past.
Thesis Chapters by Şaban Ağalar
This dissertation examines the transformation of the Islamic category of religion through a conce... more This dissertation examines the transformation of the Islamic category of religion through a conceptual history of dīn (often translated as "religion") and millet (often translated as "community") during the Ottoman Empire from the late sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries. Arabic and Turkish world histories, which flourished during this period, exhibited a significant expansion in geographical and cultural scope compared to earlier examples and rarely focused on the House of Osman or Islamic history. I argue that these world historians similarly presented dīn as a universal analytical unit, challenging traditional Islamic scholarship that had reserved dīn for Islam or other monotheistic faiths. By presenting Islam as one dīn among many, these authors viewed dīn as a universal social phenomenon comparable to other domains of human life, although differing perspectives persisted among legal scholars, polemicists, and heresiographers. These world histories, along with a growing body of literature on non-
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Workshops & Conferences by Şaban Ağalar
Papers by Şaban Ağalar
Thesis Chapters by Şaban Ağalar