"The Ottoman Medicalization of Alcoholism and Global Prohibition.” ABSTRACTS Naser Dumairieh, Could Sufism Have Been a Means of Spreading Ibn Taymiyya’s Thought in the Ottoman Empire? Ibn Taymiyya’s influence on the Ottoman intellectual milieu

Naser Dumairieh, Could Sufism Have Been a Means of Spreading Ibn Taymiyya’s Thought in the Ottoman Empire? Ibn Taymiyya’s influence on the Ottoman intellectual milieu is still a topic of debate. Most of the studies about this influence focus on three main figures and the movements associated with them: Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Birgiwī (d. 981/1573), Aḥmad al-Rūmī al-Āqḥiṣārī (d. ca. 1041/1632), and Qāḍīzāde Mehmed Efendī (d. 1044/1635). In this paper, I argue that, through tracing the debates over Ibn ʿArabī’s ideas, Ibn Taymiyya’s influence on Ottoman culture can in fact be identified more than a century earlier than al-Birgiwī. Hasan Umut, The Making of a Scientific Text in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire: Astronomy and Education in ʿAlī al-Qūshjī’s al-Risāla al-Fatḥiyya This paper aims to highlight the dynamic character of writing a scientific text in the late fifteenth century Ottoman Empire, by focusing on al-Risāla al-Fatḥiyya written by ʿAlī al-Qūshjī (d. 1474). Originally from Samarqand, Qūshjī was one of the central figures of the Samarqand Observatory and Madrasa, two prestigious institutions commissioned by Ulugh Beg (d. 1449), the then Timurid ruler of Transoxania. Towards the end of his life, Qūshjī settled in Istanbul upon the invitation of the Ottoman Sultan Meḥmed II (d. 1481), where he died after a short sojourn. A work in theoretical astronomy (ʿilm al-hayʾa), the Fatḥiyya was written under Ottoman patronage and dedicated to Meḥmed II upon his victory over the Aq Qoyunlu ruler Uzun Ḥasan in the Otlukbeli War in 1473. The literature on the Fatḥiyya has been mostly descriptive and far from scrutinizing its historical, local, scientific and pedagogical contexts. More interestingly, since the autograph copy of the Fatḥiyya (Ayasofya, 2733, ff. 1b-70a) has come down to us, the literature has largely based its account of the Fatḥiyya on this copy, due to which it has not so far been discovered that Qūshjī had revised his text while teaching it. By examining the available Fatḥiyya copies from codicological, historical, and scientific point of view, the paper will show the major revision processes and Qūshjī’s motivation of doing it. It will also underline the main actors and their intertwined relationship in the making of a scientific text. Aslıhan Gürbüzel, A New Volume for the Old Mathnawī: Book Seven of Mathnawī as a Nasihatnāme for Murād IV The seventeenth century is associated with the puritan movement of Kadızādelis and their strong impact on politics in the imperial capital. However, the religious history of the period is much more complicated, having seen the rise of Sufi orders which hitherto remained distanced from the imperial center. Among other groups, the Mawlawī order rose to prominence among the imperial elite after centuries of having limited interaction with the Ottoman center. This paper studies how the Mawlawī order re-established itself amidst political pressure and doctrinal criticism during the reign of Murād IV. The paper focuses on the Book Seven of Mathnawī as a book of advice which epitomized two significant tenets of the Mawlawī order. The first tenet was the commitment to the idea of a continuing revelation and therefore expanding canon, which necessitated Sufi authority as complementary to legal-normative expressions of Islam. The second tenet was the multiplicity of authorities, particularly a bifurcation of spiritual and worldly authorities. While this bifurcation had a long history, the Mawlawī network’s dynastic practices granted it a new political meaning by underlining the plurality of political authorities and the sovereignty of the Mawlawī çelebis of Konya. The paper argues that it was the latter political argument that resulted in Murād IV’s struggle with the Konya çelebis, rather than a doctrinal opposition to Sufism. Boğaç Ergene and Atabey Kaygun, “Semantic Mapping of a Fetva Collection: Ebussuud Efendi’s Jurisprudence Through A Computational Lens” While fetva collections are important sources for Islamic legal history, few scholars have considered a particular collection of jurisprudential opinions or the opinions of a specific jurist as specific areas of legal and historical exploration. Instead, most researchers use fetvas selectively and instrumentally, that is in small groups (at best) and in their explorations of various other topics. In this article, we propose computational methodologies that could comprehensively characterize the contents of a 6,000-fetva corpus by an important Ottoman jurist, Şeyhülislam Ebussuud Efendi (d. 1574), to reveal its substantive composition and range. In a way, the article conceptualizes a previously uncharted textual space just as a map depicts a geographical one. By doing so, it also provides insights into Ebussuud’s jurisprudential legacy and the major sociolegal concerns and anxieties in the Ottoman Empire during the sixteenth century. Yusuf Ziya Karabıçak, “Fetvas for the Rebels: Ottoman Islamic Law and Non-Muslim Rebels, 1768-1830” This paper proposes to examine the fetvas issued for Christian rebels in Ottoman Europe in late 18 and early 19 centuries. It will use fetvas recorded in the accounts of Ottoman chroniclers and those that can be found in the Ottoman archives for the period between the Ottoman-Russian War of 1768 and the end of the Greek Revolution in 1830. The goal of the paper is to demonstrate a change of terminology and an increasing incorporation of the fetvas as a weapon in the state’s arsenal, used to defend Ottoman order. Such fetvas became crucial in late 18 century as the Ottomans faced frequent revolts of its Christian populations in Ottoman Europe. This paper seeks to explore the following questions: Who had the power to enforce these fetvas? What was the terminology used in them and how did it change through time? Were there rivalries or miscommunications between the officials in the capital and those on the ground as to the meaning of such documents? What was the Ottoman center’s goal in using these fetvas and what do the changes in such texts signify? Malissa Taylor, “Trickle-Up Property Rights and Narratives of Ottoman Deficiency” My paper will argue that we have misunderstood the emergence of property right—specifically, property right in regard to land and real estate—in the Ottoman Empire because we expect it to follow a model familiar from Western historiography: namely, that property rights trickle down from aristocrats to other groups. I argue that, to the contrary, a secure property right in the Ottoman Empire began with the peasantry, not the elite. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the right of tasarruf (peasant usufruct on miri land) became increasingly legally defined and secured from intervention by the state, its agents or other parties. It was characterized by a lifetime tenure and limited right of inheritance that favored vertical descendants. With the approval of an authority figure, it could be transacted with the payment of a large upfront fee and smaller yearly payments thereafter. By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, these features served as a model of a specifically Ottoman property right that had spread to other social groups: artisans received this same property right ‘bundle’ in the form of gedik, urban renters in the form of icareteyn, and ayan in the form of the malikane. Ottoman property rights did not trickle down, they trickled up. Understanding this “trickle up” process is important because it demands a re-evaluation of Ottoman early modern development. Most of our current explanatory narratives are too focused on the relationship between the sultanate and the elite to be able to capture the evolution of real property right and its modest social origin. Colin Murtha, “Constructions of Childhood in Pre-Modern Ottoman Empire.” This talk is an exploration on the nature of youth and childhood in the early-modern Ottoman Empire. Childhood, while often not discussed, was a period which was understood as shaping and impacting one’s adult life along with one’s youth. Both were also looked back on with a nostalgia, and longing in the Ottoman world. While these notices are seldom systemic and certainly never discussed in the modern sense of biography they still offer an important insight into Ottoman mentalities and self-fashioning. These observations scattered in historic works, poems, and tezkires (biographical dictionaries of poets) of the 16and 17century while limited, clearly demonstrate an interest in the developmental periods of life. These notices while tinged by larger Islamic biographic and literary tropes still shows a fairly consistent pattern in both topic and goal which is the construction of the “self”, and or, a longing for bygone eras of one’s life. This self was often, contrary to modern biographies, articulated in terms of relationship to others rather than long descriptions of one’s own life. For example, a writer may speak on his father, or will write about a teacher or series of teacher to construct both biological and mentoring genealogies. These descriptions tend to be framed alongside specific life stages, so I read these notices as part of an Ottoman understanding of development in youth and childhood. Kate Dannies, “Gender, Family, and the Making of the Ottoman Military Family.” This research examines Ottoman approaches to military reform and modernization during the long nineteenth century from the perspective of family and gender identity. Through a critical reading of 19th century Ottoman military legislation, Sharia court records, and documents from Ottoman state welfare institutions, I show that militaries during this period were reformed to accommodate and reinforce the socioeconomic structure of the male breadwinner-led nuclear family and its attendant gender roles. This impetus led to the passage of gendered military laws that continue to structure the way that economic responsibility and family structure is viewed