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457 Pages
Acknowledgements
This volume arises from discussions at a workshop entitled ‘The Reception of Islam in Anatiolia in the 12th–15th centuries’ held at the Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilisation (RCAC) in Istanbul in September 2013. The workshop was funded by the European Research Council through the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–13) / ERC Grant Agreement n 208476, ‘The Islamisation of Anatolia, c. 1100–1500’, whose financial contribution the editors gratefully acknowledge. We would also like to thank the then director of the RCAC, Scott Redford, for his assistance with the practical arrangements and for hosting the workshop. We are also grateful to John Smedley and the staff at Ashgate for seeing this book through the press.
Note on Transliteration and Place Names
Any volume attempting to bring together materials in Arabic, Armenian, Greek, Latin, Persian, Syriac and Turkish brings formidable editorial problems, and the readers’ indulgence is begged if we have not invariably been able to achieve consistency. For place names, to aid ready identification on a map we have generally given the modern Turkish version in addition to the Greek or Armenian versions where authors have preferred these. The index contains comprehensive cross-references to variant forms used in this volume. Arabic and Persian follow the standard forms of transliteration in English language publications; for Turkish names, the modern Turkish orthography has generally been preferred except in the case of some eleventh- and twelfth-century Turkish names which are much more familiar in their Arabised guise (e.g. Tughril, Duqaq, Qutlumush, not Tuğrıl, Dukak, Kutlumuş). Vowel length is not indicated on Turkish words.
Notes on Contributors Alexander D. Beihammer, PhD (1999), Vienna, is Associate Professor of Byzantine History at the University of Cyprus. He has published on Byzantine diplomatics and on political and cross-cultural relations between Byzantium and the Muslim World and is currently preparing a monograph on the Seljuq conquest of Asia Minor. S. Peter Cowe is Narekatsi Professor of Armenian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include medieval Armenian intellectual history and modern Armenian nationalism. The author of five books in the field and editor of nine, he contributes regularly to scholarly journals and is the past co-editor of the Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies. Bruno De Nicola is Research Fellow in Middle Eastern Studies in the School of History, University of St Andrews, UK. His publications include ‘Women’s role and participation in warfare in the Mongol Empire’, in Soldatinnen. Gewalt und Geschlecht im Krieg vom Mittelalter bis Heute, edited by K. Klaus Latzel, S. Satjukow and F. Maubach (Schöningh, 2010), 95–112; ‘Ruling from tents: The existence and structure of women’s ordos in Ilkhanid Iran’, in Ferdowsi, The Mongols and Iranian History: Art, Literature and Culture from Early Islam to Qajar Persia, edited by R. Hillenbrand, A. Peacock and F. Abdullaeva (I.B. Tauris, 2013), 116–36; ‘The Ladies of Rūm: A Hagiographic View on Women in the 13th and 14th Century Anatolia’, Journal of Sufi Studies (2014); as editor (with Y. Mendel and H. Qutbbudin) Knowledge and Language in Middle Eastern Societies (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010). Antony Eastmond is AG Leventis Reader in the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. His books Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia (1998) and Art and Identity in Thirteenth-Century Byzantium: Hagia Sophia and the Empire of Trebizond (2004) have explored many aspects of interaction between the cultures of the Caucasus and the Pontos and their neighbours. He is currently editing a book, Viewing Inscriptions in the Late Antique and Medieval World, and holds a two-year major research fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust to complete a book on women, power and identity from the Mediterranean to Mongolia in the thirteenth century. Ahmet T. Karamustafa is Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA. His expertise is in the social and intellectual history of Sufism in particular and Islamic piety in general in the medieval and early modern periods. He has also conducted research on Islamic cartography as well as religious literature. His publications include God’s Unruly Friends (University of Utah Press, 1994) and Sufism: The Formative Period (Edinburgh University Press and University of California Press, 2007). He is currently working on a book project titled Vernacular Islam: Everyday Muslim Religious Life in Medieval Turkey. Johannes Pahlitzsch is Professor for Byzantine Studies at the Johannes GutenbergUniversität Mainz, Germany. He published a monograph on the history of the Greek Orthodox patriarchate of Jerusalem in the crusader period, and is coeditor of Christian–Muslim Relations: A Historical Bibliography and has published numerous articles on the situation of oriental Christians under Muslim rule in the Middle Ages and the relations between Byzantium and the Islamic world. He has been awarded fellowships of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections, Washington DC, and is member of the board of the Leibniz Science Campus Mainz ‘Byzantium between Orient and Occident’. Andrew Peacock is Reader in Middle Eastern Studies in the School of History, University of St Andrews, UK. His main publications include Mediaeval Islamic Historiography and Political Legitimacy: Bal‘amī’s Tārīkhnāma (Routledge, 2007); Early Seljūq History: A New Interpretation (Routledge, 2010); The Great Seljuk Empire (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), and as editor (with Sara Nur Yıldız), The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East (I.B. Tauris, 2013). He is Principal Investigator of the European Research Council-funded research project ‘The Islamisation of Anatolia, c. 1100–1500’. Judith Pfeiffer is Associate Professor of Arabic at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the intellectual history of the later middle and early modern periods of Islamic history. She has published on religion and politics and in particular conversion processes in the Ilkhanid, Timurid, Ottoman, and Safavid contexts and is editor or co-editor of History and Historiography of PostMongol Central Asia and the Middle East: Studies in Honor of John E. Woods (Wiesbaden 2006, with Sholeh A. Quinn), Theoretical Approaches to the Transmission and Edition of Oriental Manuscripts (Würzburg 2007, with Manfred Kropp), and Politics, Patronage and the Transmission of Knowledge in 13th–15th Century Tabriz (Leiden/ New York, 2014). Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, DPhil in Byzantine Studies at the University of Vienna, is researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Institute for Medieval Research, Division of Byzantine Research. His main research fields are Byzantine history in global comparison and entanglement within the medieval world, social network analysis and complexity theory as well as social, economic and environmental history. He has authored the monograph Der Episkopat im späten Byzanz. Ein Verzeichnis der Metropoliten und Bischöfe des Patriarchats von Konstantinopel in der Zeit von 1204 bis 1453 (Saarbrücken, 2008) and (co)-edited a variety of volumes on the medieval history of South-Eastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean.
Salam Rassi is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford whose research focuses on the cultural, social and political experiences of Christian communities living under Muslim rule in pre-modern times, particularly in the Ilkhanid period. His thesis examines the written legacy of the late medieval Syriac Christian polymath ʿAbdīshōʿ of Nisibis and his philosophical and theological contacts with the Islamic world. He has taught courses on Islamic history at the Royal Holloway, University of London and has recently contributed a forthcoming chapter entitled ‘Between ʿaṣabiyya and ecumenism: ʿAbdīshōʿ bar Brīkhā’s attitudes towards other Christians’ to an edited volume on Syriac Christianity in its multicultural context (Peeters). Scott Redford is Nasser D. Khalili Professor of the Art and Archaeology of Islam, Department of Art and Archaeology, School of Oriental and African Studies, London. His most recent book is Legends of Authority: The 1215 Seljuk Inscriptions of Sinop Citadel, Turkey (Koç University Press, 2014). Rustam Shukurov (PhD, DSc in History) works in History Department of Moscow State University. His research interests include Byzantine, Seljuq and Ottoman, Central Asian history and culture. He is the author of the monograph The Grand Komnenoi and the Orient (1204–1461) (St Petersburg, 2001) and more than 100 articles on Byzantine-Oriental relations. Tolga B. Uyar (PhD University Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2011) specialises in Byzantine art, architecture and archaeology, with special emphasis on the monumental painting of Cappadocia. His broader research interests include the methodological questions related to the ‘archaeology of art’, the interactions between visual, written, oral and material cultures in the medieval Mediterranean, popular piety across religions, and the issues of identity as they relate to artistic production. In 2013–14 he was a Fellow in residence at Dumbarton Oaks where he worked on a book project on the cultural residue of the Greek-speaking Orthodox communities of central Anatolia after the end of Byzantine rule. He is currently a Postdoctoral Research collaborator in the ‘Towards an institutional and social history of Byzantine Asia Minor on the evidence of seals and other sources (7th–13th centuries)’ project at the Academy of Athens. Philip Wood is Associate Professor at Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisation, which is based in London. He teaches the History of Late Antiquity and the Study of Religion. He also coordinates the MA in Muslim Heritage for a student body that is drawn from across the ‘Muslim world’, Europe and America. He researches Christians in the Roman and early Islamic Near East and has published two monographs, ‘We Have No King but Christ’: Christian Political Thought in Greater Syria on the Eve of the Arab Conquest (c.400–585) (Oxford, 2010) and The Chronicle of Seert: Christian Historical Imagination in Late Antique Iraq (Oxford, 2013).
Riza Yıldırım is Associate Professor of Ottoman and Safavid History at TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Ankara. He specialises in the history and religiosity of Alid-tinged Sufi groups in the Ottoman and Safavid Empires with particular reference to Qizilbash/Alevi and Bektashi communities. He published a number of books and articles on the socio-cultural and religious history of Qizilbash/Alevis, Bektashis, Akhis, and related socio-religious groups. Sara Nur Yıldız is a Research Fellow at University of St Andrews employed on a European Research Council-funded research project entitled ‘Islamisation of Anatolia, c. 1100–1500’ and is affiliated with the Orient-Institut Istanbul. Dr Yıldız received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2006. Her research encompasses the political, religious and cultural history of medieval Anatolia spanning the Seljuq, Mongol, beylik and early Ottoman periods.
Introduction
A.C.S. Peacock, Bruno De Nicola and Sara Nur Yıldız The eleventh-century invasions of the Seljuq Turks affected to some degree almost every part of the Middle East. Nowhere, however, was their legacy as profoundly transformative as in the Anatolian peninsula. Up to the mideleventh century, Anatolia had been an almost entirely Christian land, populated largely by Greeks and Armenians and smaller numbers of Georgians and Syrian Christians. Anatolia represented the core territories of the Byzantine empire upon which Constantinople relied for revenue, and many emperors were themselves of Anatolian origins, whether Greek or Armenian. Over the seventh to tenth centuries, Byzantium had resisted, more or less successfully, Arab attacks that had reached on occasion as far west as Constantinople itself. Indeed, in the late tenth and early eleventh century, Byzantium started to expand eastwards, incorporating Arab territories around Lake Van and even in northern Syria. There was little clue that the infiltration of Turkish nomads of Central Asian origin, whose leaders had recently founded the Seljuq empire in Iran and Iraq in the 1040s, would lead to the sudden collapse of the Byzantine empire in Asia in the wake of the great Turkish victory at Manzikert in 1071. By the 1080s, however, Turkish Muslims controlled most of Anatolia; Byzantine territories were reduced to a few coastal outposts. Byzantium at times regained some coastal and western parts of Anatolia, but it was never able to challenge Turkish suzerainty in the Anatolian interior. Although Byzantium survived, much weakened, until the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453, it never recovered from the loss of its Anatolian heartland. Nonetheless, Muslim rule in medieval Anatolia was never monolithic (see Maps 1–4). Alongside the best known Turkish dynasty, the Seljuqs (r. in Anatolia c.1081–1307), existed a host of other Muslim dynasties, such as the Artuqids of the Diyar Bakr, the Mengüjekids of Erzincan and the Danishmendids of central Anatolia.1 The situation was further complicated by the dominance in Anatolia from the midthirteenth to the mid-fourteenth centuries of the Mongols, whose early rulers, and many of their troops, were pagan. In the wake of Mongol collapse, Muslim Anatolia was divided into numerous different Turkish principalities (beyliks) in the fourteenth century, of which the leading ones were the Karamanids of southcentral Anatolia, and the Aydınids in the southwest. It was out of this complex political situation that the Ottoman beylik first arose in northwestern Anatolia.2 The Byzantine legacy was remembered in the name the Muslims gave to Anatolia, Rūm (i.e. Rome; the Byzantines identified themselves as Rhomaioi or ‘Romans’, alluding to their own claim to inherit the legacy of the Roman empire). The branch of the Seljuq dynasty that established itself in Rūm sought to appropriate the classical and Byzantine heritage.3 Indeed, the ensuing social and cultural transformation of Anatolia was much less rapid than the political change. However, over the course of the Middle Ages, the dominant religion became Islam, spread not just by the settlement of the Turkish migrants but also by the conversion of local Christians, and Islamic languages – Persian and Turkish – came to supplement, and eventually replace, Greek and Armenian as the main lingua francas of the Anatolian cities (Arabic remained reserved largely for religious purposes, and Greek and Armenian continued to be important in many rural communities).4 Although the final transformation of Anatolia into an almost entirely Muslim, Turkish-speaking land did not take place until the First World War and its immediate aftermath, it was during the period between roughly 1100 and 1400 that Islam achieved its position of dominance. The Anatolian territories that the Ottomans conquered in the fifteenth century were ones where, even if still inhabited by numerous Christians, perhaps often a majority of Christians, society was dominated by not just the faith of Islam, but more generally by Muslim institutions and culture. The Turkish invasions did not, therefore, suddenly destroy Christianity in Anatolia, any more than the Arab invasions of other parts of the Middle East in the seventh century had led to sudden and wholescale conversions to Islam. Islam and Christianity long coexisted. Although no doubt the political and cultural supremacy of Islam made it at times an attractive choice for converts, there must have been other, more complex reasons for its appeal: in Anatolia, we have some of the earliest evidence anywhere in the Middle East for the conversion to Islam of Mongol soldiery in the mid-thirteenth century,5 suggesting political dominance was not the sole, or even necessarily the decisive factor in prompting conversions. The nature of this coexistence, and the gradual process of cultural, religious and societal transformation which medieval Anatolia experienced, have been surprisingly rarely investigated. In part, research has doubtless been deterred by both the apparent lack of sources – we have very few Muslim chronicles of Anatolia, and the documentation of Christian communities under Muslim rule is often extremely sparse – as well as the linguistic diversity of those that are known.6 The purpose of this volume is to bring together contributions by specialists in both the Christian and Muslim societies of medieval Anatolia to offer fresh perspectives on the relationship between the two faiths, and the emergence of Islamic society there in this formative period of c.1071–1400. Later in this introduction we shall survey these contributions. First, however, it is worth reflecting on the state of the art in research on the theme of this volume. The Historiography of ‘Turkish Islam’ in Medieval Anatolia and Christian-Muslim Relations In terms of theoretical approaches, scholarship on Islam and Muslim–Christian relations in medieval Anatolia has until very recently been largely static. The prevailing scholarship, especially that produced in Turkey, remains stubbornly entrenched in nineteenth-century theoretical paradigms and notions regarding religion and thus largely unaffected by current international trends in religious studies and history due to the Turkish nationalistic framework in which these paradigms have been embedded. Indeed, an ossified nationalist discourse, devised to confirm the Turkish state’s ‘natural’ rights to its territorial holdings in Anatolia, leaves little room for paradigmatic shifts. Thus, these outdated paradigms and notions continue to define medieval Anatolian Islam, as well as its relationship to Christianity, in both Turkish and western scholarship.7 Nevertheless, recent years have seen a shift in approach by some scholars and the attempt to create alternative narratives for the religious history of Muslim Turkish Anatolia is now well underway.
Here we will briefly survey the prevailing scholarship of the religious history and interfaith relations of late medieval Anatolia, addressing the question of how scholars have conceptualised Islam as it was established in Anatolia following the Seljuq invasions to the rise of the early Ottoman dynastic state. We likewise review the role given to Sufism and its main actors, charismatic dervishes, in the spread of Islam in Anatolia, as well as the dynamics of Muslim–Christian interaction and the influence Christianity has exerted on the shaping of Anatolian Islam. Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Modernist Discourses on Monotheistic Religion: Pagan Residues, Religious Authenticity and Heterodoxy In order to understand better how Islam has been conceptualised in medieval Anatolia, it would be helpful to review notions regarding religion and religious history circulating in both the popular imagination and academic circles in the nineteenth-century. Since its conception, the field of religious studies has been shaped by tension between the study of revealed religion based on scripture, designated as ‘high’, and popular or ‘natural’ religion, defined by practices found outside scripture and designated as ‘low’.8 Equally important to the modernist conceptualisation of religious history are Darwinian evolutionary models and the notion of primitive religion and its residues in monotheisms. Discourses of modernity not only emphasise the essence and boundaries of phenomena, but also their origins. Thus, within this nineteenth-century modernist evolutionary perspective of religious development, one of the most popular themes in the history of monotheistic religions such as Christianity and Islam was that of pagan residues, which Durkheim worked systematically into sociological theory. Durkheim’s notion of the primitive origins of religion, which sees pagan residues in all religions, was in turn assimilated by Orientalists such as Ignaz Goldziher. Indeed, the brilliant Goldziher, whose formulations laid the foundations of the modern academic study of Islam,9 in the 1880s examined pagan residues and customs found in various Islamic practices such as the veneration of saints and the visiting of sacred shrines.10 Long before scholars specialising in the languages and history of Islamic Turcophone Anatolia began to lay down the foundations of their field, popular ideas influenced by modernist discourse on religion circulated among Europeans with various (and often, colonial) interests in Anatolia. Nineteenth century and early twentieth-century Europeans and Americans travelling and living in Ottoman Anatolia and the Balkans interpreted their encounter with Islam according to these emergent modernist discourses on religion. Whether archaeologists, classicists, New Testament scholars, Protestant missionaries or geographers on state-sponsored missions, these European travellers were keen to seek out pagan residues and heretical practices among Muslim communities in Anatolia.11 Indeed, the notion of heterodoxy, a term which came to be applied quite widely to local practices of Islam in Anatolia, rose out of modernist discourses of essences, origins and boundaries, which distinguished pure authentic forms of religion from those which were less so; supposedly less pure forms thus constituted heterodoxies tainted with unauthentic and incompatible elements.12 The Köprülü Paradigm In the early twentieth century, the Turkish scholar Mehmed Fuad Köprülü, thoroughly steeped in the works of Durkheim, applied these modernist discourses in his creation of an alternative narrative for Anatolian Islam cast within a Turkish nationalist framework.13 In this act of reappropriation of what he considered his national history, he interpreted pagan or Christian residues in Islam as shamanistic traces originating from a largely imagined ancient Turkish Central Asian past, and characterised heterodox folk Islam as harbouring the true unchanging essence of Turkishness over time and geography.14 The Köprülü paradigm, as it has recently come to be referred to by its critics, has remained dominant up to the present, passed on more or less intact by subsequent generations of scholars examining Anatolian Islam and Sufism, such as Irène Mélikoff and her student, Ahmet Yaşar Ocak. Scholarship produced according to the Köprülü paradigm conceives of popular religion as a static, unchanging and undynamic construct, and maintains a strict dichotomy between high and low Islam, with conformist urban Sufis contrasted with nonconformist rural Sufis. For instance, Ocak maintains that the ‘non-Sunni’ Sufi order of the Qalandariyya broadly appealed to the Turkmen of the thirteenth century because they were only superficially Islamised, and its practices better accommodated local pre-Islamic beliefs and traditions. For, as Ocak points out, Sufism probably meant little more for the Qalandariyya ‘than a form of social life, rather than being a means of attaining any mystic goals’.15 The Köprülü paradigm likewise accommodates the dichotomy between the Anatolian hinterland, the centre of power characterised by Perso-Islamic urban and court culture and ‘high’ Islam, and the western frontier (and, in particular, the Balkans during the early Turkish conquests), populated by Turkish raiders or ghāzīs waging holy war against the Christians. According to this perspective, popular Turkish Islam flourished in this frontier society; indeed, far away from the control mechanisms of the centre, the frontier was the ideal environment for heterodox Islam.16 Both Paul Wittek’s foundational ghāzī thesis explaining the rise of the Ottoman state and Rudi Paul Lindner’s counter argument based on tribal rather than religious solidarity as the motivating force behind the Ottoman conquests, seamlessly fit within this paradigm which construes a strict dichotomy between hinterland and frontier society as first proposed by Köprülü.17 Over the past few decades, a few critics, generally scholars working outside Turkey and often in the United States, have questioned aspects of the Köprülü paradigm.18 In an attempt to work outside the binary constructs of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, Cemal Kafadar revisited the question of Anatolian and Balkan Islam along the frontier in his monograph Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State. 19 Characterising the practice of Islam as fluid as the frontier itself, Kafadar replaces the orthodox-heterodox division with the notion of metadoxy (defined as ‘a state of being beyond doxies’) to describe the frontier’s religious complexity.20 A new generation of students, largely inspired by Kafadar’s reconceptualisation of the fluid and flexible structures of the western frontier, have begun more systematically to chip away at the edifice of the Köprülü paradigm. The edifice, however, remains wholly intact in Turkish academia.21 Christian-Muslim Relations: Violent Ruptures or Latent Continuities? Scholarship on Christian-Muslim encounters and interaction in late medieval Anatolia has been dominated by two principal paradigms: Speros Vryonis’s narrative of the decline and destruction of Byzantine Christianity in Asia Minor through the invasions and conquests of Muslim and often nomadic Turks and the establishment of Turkokratia in Anatolia, and F.W. Hasluck’s conceptualisation of Muslim–Christian syncretism, with a focus on shared sacred spaces and the emergence of an Islamic ‘heterodoxy’ in interaction with Christianity. These two paradigms are diametrically opposed to one another; indeed, Hasluck’s anthropological model of peaceful religious accommodation and continuity contrasts sharply with Vryonis’s nationalistically tinged historical narrative of violent ruptures. Vryonis’s massive tome, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamisation from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century, is perhaps the most cited single work on Muslim–Christian interaction in the late medieval era.22 Vryonis argues that the Turkish conquest resulted in the destruction of a vital Christian society based predominantly on a medieval Greek cultural element. Constant military strife throughout four centuries caused dislocation and destruction to the Christian and Hellenic culture of Byzantine Anatolia. In an attempt to understand the transformative process by which Hellenistic Asia Minor, or Anatolia, becomes Islamised by the Turks, Vryonis documents the massive devastation rendered by incessant raids throughout the Turkish conquest, occurring in two phases, with the first from the late eleventh to midtwelfth century, and the second from the mid-thirteenth to the fourteenth century. Vryonis stresses the physical destruction of towns, the uprooting of the Christian population, the decline of agriculture, and the resulting hardship brought upon the local Christian communities. He likewise provides documentation of conversions from the late eleventh and the twelfth century, accompanied by a description of Turkmen and their way of life. Vryonis concludes that during the first phase, the Turks constituted ‘a small but powerful minority.’23 It was during the second phase of the Turkish conquest which continued until the fourteenth century that a large-scale conversion to Islam among Christian communities occurred in parallel to the destruction of the church administration under Turkokratia. Vryonis’s narrative presents us with shortsighted bureaucratic politicians based in Constantinople with little concern for the provinces while marauding nomadic Turks brought about the destruction of Christian urban centres and towns, and their ecclesiastical structures. Vryonis relegates his discussion of Islam and conversion to a brief chapter, accounting for Christian conversion to Islam as a result of the second-class position relegated to Christians as dhimmī under Muslim rule.24 Vryonis draws upon the secondary literature of both Western and Turkish scholars regarding the role of dervish orders in the spread of Islam (principally the Bektashi and Mevlevi), and reviews syncretism between Islamic and Christian beliefs (giving some space to the Hasluck paradigm). Vryonis likewise touches upon the themes of dervish toleration and the role of akhīs (Turk. ahi, members of urban fraternal religious guilds) in conversion, wholesale adopting Ömer Lüfti Barkan’s notion that dervish orders were instrumental in making converts to Islam (which appears to have been possibly, if not indirectly inspired by Hasluck’s emphasis on so-called ‘heteredox’ proselytising dervishes associated with shared shrines). Yet, with its highly Byzantine-centric perspective, Speros Vryonis’ study of the decline of Hellenism and the Islamisation of Anatolia imparts little information about Anatolian Islam and its cultural dynamics. Rather, it is a dense account that documents the purportedly massive devastation accompanying the Turkish raids and conquest beginning in the late eleventh and extending into the midfourteenth century. Although Vryonis succeeds in detailing the decline and demise of ecclesiastical dioceses in Anatolia, he presents a rather one-sided picture. Thus, while the work is ostensibly in part about the Islamisation of Byzantine society, we learn little about the actual process. Vryonis’ paradigm has been challenged by recent studies of fifteenthcentury Christian communities based on Ottoman archival documentation, such as Heath Lowry’s study of the Lesbos and Tom (Anastasios) Papademetriou’s recent work on Ottoman tax farming and the Greek Orthodox church.25 Arguing in contrast to the Vryonis thesis that posits non-Muslim status as a distinct disadvantage in Muslim Anatolia, Heath Lowry demonstrates that Christian populations remained intact during the early Ottoman period largely because of the important services they provided the Ottoman state during the period of consolidation of conquests, a policy referred to as accommodation, or istimalet. 26 According to Lowry, the Ottoman state in fact was forced to rely on the highly skilled Christian population in the administration of conquered Christian lands as a result of the ‘chronic shortage in manpower’.27 However, the best known, and certainly most influential, alternative to the Vryonis approach is the work of Frederick W. Hasluck (1878–1920). Although his contribution has only recently started to be recognised as it deserves,28 perhaps no one has had as much influence in shaping the course of scholarship on Christian-Muslim interaction in Anatolia, and in particular, the resulting ‘Turkish’ Islam shaped by this interaction. Hasluck’s monumental study, Christianity and Islam under the Sultans, 29 published posthumously, laid down the framework of syncretic developments in Muslim Turkish Anatolia. His model is grounded in early anthropological theory which emphasises cultural continuity over discontinuity and change: that cultures endure and are intrinsically resistant to change constitutes a major assumption.30 Hasluck’s approach brings to the fore religious continuity in Anatolia by focusing on the transference of sacred space and sites through intermediary cultic figures in Anatolia.31 Christian-Muslim syncretism not only resulted in the sharing of saints, shrines and sacred space, but also brought about the emergence of Christian-influenced Muslim heterodoxies particular to ‘Turkish’ Islam, and a corps of ‘heterodox’ dervishes associated with these shrines shared by Muslims and Christians alike. Thus, whereas Vryonis emphasises the destructive effect of the Turkish invasions, which ultimately led to conversions in the face of a weakened Christian church, Hasluck conceives of Islamisation as occurring in shared sacred spaces where Christians were receptive to tolerant forms of syncretic Islam. Through intimate contact and accommodation, Islam was in turn shaped by Christian practices, beliefs and sensibilities. Much of subsequent scholarship on Anatolian Islam, and in particular, the Bektashis, is a merging of the Köprülü paradigm with Hasluck’s notions of shared sacred space, ambiguous saints and shrines, and Bektashism as an intermediary form of Islamisation, a ‘way station’ between Christianity and Islam.32 The heterodox dervish plays a leading role in both concepualisations, as well as the differentiation between urban Sunni orthodox Islam and rural Islamic practices.33 According to Hasluck’s conceptualisation, Bektashism constituted the quintessential religious syncretism, where Bektashi saints or awliyāʼ (Turk. evliya) replaced Christian ones, which in turn could be traced to even more ancient cults. As Tijana Krstić observes, Hasluck considered the ambiguous sanctuary claimed by both Muslims and Christians ‘a distinct stage of development – the period of equipoise – in the transition both from Christianity to Bektashism …’.34
Michel Balivet likewise conceptualises Anatolian and Balkan Islam according to the fusion of the Hasluck and Köprülü models. In his Romanie byzantine et pays de Rûm turc: histoire d’un espace d’imbrication gréco-turque, 35 Balivet points out that since Sufism was highly receptive to non-Muslim influences, it was attractive to Christians, and thus was the usual venue of conversion. According to Balivet, heterodoxy and syncretism were prerequisites for a tolerant rapport between Christianity and Islam.36 Krstić’s Challenge: Rethinking Syncreticism and Tolerance In the context of the nature of Anatolian and Balkan Islam as well as Muslim–Christian relations, Tijana Krstić’s work presents a significant challenge not only to the Köprülü paradigm and its various binaries, but also to notions of shared space and saints as a form of religious toleration.37 Krstić’s reinterpretation of the concept of syncretism (a term which Hasluck never actually used, but which became associated with his ideas) leads her to question some of the most firmly established analytical categories of the field, such as the iconic proselytising frontier dervish, who populates popular hagiographical literature such as Hacı Bektas’s Velayet-name and the Saltuk-name. 38 Not only does Krstić reject the widely held notion that dervishes were the main agents of conversion and representatives of heterodox Islam, but she also criticises the widely held notion that incomplete or superficial conversions to Islam resulted in a syncretic and tolerant form of the religion which provided an easy transition into Islam for those newly converted from Christianity.39 Krstić proposes that the phenomenon of ambiguous shrines was ‘an instance of Islamisation of space rather than people’.40 Questioning how peaceful the coexistence of Islam and Christianity was in the early Ottoman empire, Krstić reinterprets shared sacred space (or ambiguous sanctuaries, to use Hasluck’s phrase) as ‘sites of intense inter-religious negotiation’, where ‘religious differences are upheld rather than collapsed’.41 Krstić argues that these shared shrines are sites of perpetual competition and negotiation, which need to be understood in terms of local power relations: ‘the deeply competitive aspect of ambiguous shrines and thus as points of intense interfaith polemics rather than reconciliation is often lost to modern students of the Ottoman empire’.42 Krstić grounds her argument in a masterful critique of the hagiographic sources, hitherto used by historians as evidence of heterodoxy and religious tolerance. For instance, Krstić rereads the frontier warrior-dervish epic, the Saltuk-name43 not as an example of ‘Ottoman syncretism and conciliatory attitudes towards Christians’44 as A.H. Akalın proposes in his interpretation of Sarı Saltuk’s preaching to Christians from a supposedly original and unaltered Gospel containing the announcement of Muḥammad’s prophethood. Krstić alternatively interprets this passage as a condemnation of Christianity via the accusation of taḥrīf, or the changing of scripture. Krstić characterises early Ottoman Turkish narratives such as the Saltuk-name and the Velayet-name as ‘anti-sycretic texts par excellence’ which, in their narratives of violence and ‘great converting zeal’, demonstrate ‘ideological investment in a firm upholding of religious boundaries’.45 Krstić concludes that the task of the historian is to approach these syncretic forms of Islam with a critical eye by taking into account of the competitive aspects of the ‘politics of religious synthesis’.46 Through a thorough investigation of not only the concepts and theoretical approaches lying behind the historiography of Anatolian and Balkan Islam, but primarily through a close rereading of the sources, paying attention to their rhetorical and polemical constructs, Krstić presents us with a compelling re-evaluation of the phenomenon of Islam in the Ottoman world as well as new analytical tools by which to view Muslim–Christian relations and, in particular, the phenomenon of conversion.
Convivencia: The Andalusian Paradigm Recent scholarship on religious diversity in Anatolia has also looked for inspiration across the Mediterranean, to the societies of Muslim Spain (al-Andalus) and Sicily.47 Although the political, economic and social context differed across the medieval Mediterranean, the methodological and conceptual frameworks used in other regions, the individual case studies and even the sporadic encounters between the western and eastern Mediterranean can contribute to a better understanding of the historical processes in the whole area. In addition, scholarship on medieval Iberia has tended to be more sophisticated than that on Anatolia, as well as benefiting from a more accessible source base, and can inform debates on religious diversity in the eastern Mediterranean. Conquered during the first wave of Arab invasion in the early eighth century, the history of Islamic Iberia has been the subject of extensive research.48 Likewise, the process of Christian Reconquista that gathered strength from the mid-eleventh century has also caught the attention of historians.49 There is a general view that Islamic Iberia (al-Andalus) was the peak of religious tolerance defined by convivencia between Christians, Jews and Muslims, and a recent conference on Byzantium sought to appropriate the Spanish term convivencia (lit. ‘living together’ or ‘coexistence’),50 developed to describe Muslim, Christian and Jewish coexistence in al-Andalus. The notion, in particular, plays a prominent role in the work of Sergio La Porta on twelfth- to thirteenth-century Armenia. La Porta understands convivencia as meaning ‘a practical modality of coexistence between different religious and ethnic groups that neither prejudices nor presumes modern notions of tolerance or of multiculturalism’.51 It thus worth pausing to briefly consider, for comparative purposes, the approach of scholarship on Spain and Sicily. In recent times, the term convivencia has become politically charged and has spread beyond the field of history to permeate political discourse aiming to offer a somewhat mythical vision of tolerance and to address modern concerns about religious intolerance.52 However, convivencia has been commonly used in academia since the mid-twentieth century to refer to interaction between different faiths in the Iberian Peninsula. The term was originally coined by the Spanish historian Américo Castro who, in his exile from Franco’s Spain, theorised about the uniqueness of the historical development of Spain that was cemented in inter-religious tolerance between Muslims, Jews and Christians which was encouraged by Muslim rulers.53 According to Castro, this ‘ideal world’ came to an end with the conquest of Granada in 1492, which resulted in centuries of Christian intolerance towards the other minorities who were eventually expelled from the Peninsula.54 Castro’s idealistic approach was subject to scholarly criticism from the first, especially given the existence of several examples of violence, persecution and conflict between the three religions in al-Andalus.55 Indeed, some of the earliest objections came from another Spanish exile, Claudio Sanchez-Albornoz.56 Sanchez-Albornoz’s criticism, however, mostly focused on where the origins of Spain lay (according to him in Roman times) rather than on the debate over the existence of convivencia in al-Andalus, which he saw as a less relevant period in the formation of modern Spain. Ever since the mid-twentieth century, these two historians have marked the two opposite poles in the theoretical debate about Islamic Spain and the applicability of the term convivencia to define this historical period. Castro’s paradigm remains alive and well, especially in Spanish academia. The existence of violence has been explained away as a product of ‘external influence’ – the Almoravids and Almohads from North Africa, or Christians from northern Spain.57 However, some studies have attempted to demystify the Andalusian ‘paradise of tolerance’ by highlighting how contemporary source material records intolerance, violence and persecution not only between members of different religious confessions but also in different groups within Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities living in the peninsula far before the arrivals of the Maghrebi dynasties.58 The debate is far from coming to an end but a certain general consensus on the existence of both convivencia and violencia in medieval Iberia seems to be emerging. In a recent article, Anna Akasoy argued that the exceptionalism of a place’s historical circumstances can be challenged by expanding the geographical spectrum of analysis. Certainly, if we look to Muslim Sicily, al-Andalus no longer looks so exceptional.59 Byzantine-controlled Sicily was conquered by the Muslims and later taken over by the Normans in the second half of the eleventh century.60 The amalgamation between Byzantine, Arab and Latin cultural trends and the changing status of three different religious affiliations (Orthodox Christianity, Islam and Catholicism) has attracted the attention of scholars trying to address the question of how these religions interacted (or not) with one another. The general view on the Islamisation of Sicily is that the Christian-Italo-Greek population acculturated and Islamised in the coastal regions of the isle, leaving the inner areas somewhere in between both cultures, where coexistence of Arabo-Islamic, Greco-Christian and Arabised Jews survived.61 Yet, Alex Metcalfe has shown that after the Arab invasion of Sicily, there was a planned repopulation of the main towns with people brought from Ifrīqiya (North Africa) while the changes in rural areas seems to have followed a more slower process of progressively assimilating Arabic as a second language or converting to Islam in the course of a ‘few generations’.62 Despite the reestablishment of Christian rule in Sicily by Roger I (Count of Sicily, d. 1101), the persistence of the Arabic language among the population and the adaptation of an Islamic administrative system under the Normans also contributed to the interaction between cultural and religious diversity in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Sicily.63 Akasoy’s claim can be also applied to the religious encounters of medieval Anatolia. Akasoy mentions that occasionally, certain Christian communities in al-Andalus expressed the idea that they were living in a situation similar to that of Christians in Anatolia.64 While direct interaction between the Iberian and Anatolian peninsulas deserves further research, we can cite some well-known links –Ibn ʿArabī, the great thirteenth-century Muslim mystic of Murcian origin who made Seljuq Anatolia his home for several years is the most famous example.65 However, in terms of historical development and religious diversity, both peninsulas share certain features. The circumstances of Christian communities changed, sometimes dramatically, from period to period. Orthodox Greek communities in Anatolia experienced different conditions under the Seljuqs of Rūm, Mongol domination or the Beylik period in the same way that, for example, Mozarabs (Christians living in al-Andalus) had different experiences of Muslim rule under the Umayyad Caliphate, the various taifa kingdoms or in the kingdom of Granada.66 Being aware of these contextual specificities helps to escape the polarisation of the debate either in the case of Anatolia or the Iberian Peninsula and suggests approaching issues of identity and processes of acculturation and Islamisation as a transformative process that occurred over a prolonged period of time and in different stages. The Current Volume The scholarship surveyed above suggests that, after nearly a century of dominance, the study of Islam and Christianity in medieval Anatolia is beginning to move beyond the dominance of the paradigms of Köprülü and Hasluck. Nonetheless, the field remains under the shadow of Vryonis’s great but problematic work, and progress has been impeded by the fact that few specialists are able to master both the Christian and Muslim source materials, and only rarely have scholars from across the disciplinary divide sought to collaborate. The present volume aims to fill this lacuna, focusing on the relations between Islam and Christianity and the development of Islam in Anatolia in this formative period from the Turkish invasions to the early Ottoman period (c.1071–1400).67 One of the most critical issues to improve our understanding of the issues of Islamisation and interfaith relations in medieval Anatolia is to broaden our source base beyond the scant Muslim chronicles in Persian which exist for the period. Accordingly, contributions draw on a wide range of written sources, ranging from unpublished manuscript material (the contributions of Peacock and Rassi both contain editions and translations of previously unpublished texts), other published sources which have rarely been brought to bear on the problem in a cogent and convincing manner (for example the medieval Turkish literary texts used by Yıldız and Karamustafa), and archival documents such as the waqfiyyas (endowment deeds) referred to by Redford and Pfeiffer. Other contributions (e.g. Beihammer, Shukurov, Cowe) make use of Christian sources in Latin, Greek, and Armenian, which are little known to specialists on Muslim Anatolia. The volume demonstrates that the written sources are rather richer than is often imagined; but valuable insights can also be gained from material culture. The art historical contributions of Eastmond and Uyar illustrate the potential for art and architecture to offer new perspectives and to shed light on the nature of inter-confessional interaction outside the elites who remain the focus of the literary texts. The volume is divided into three parts. The first of these, ‘Christian Experiences of Muslim Rule’ opens with a chapter by Philip Wood which sets the experience of Anatolian Christians in its historical perspective, investigating more generally the fate of Christian communities under Muslim rule in the first centuries of Muslim domination, up to the eve of the Turkish invasion. Wood (following Chase Robinson) suggests that for some, Muslim rule ushered in what he describes as an ‘Indian summer’, but he also investigates the processes by which conversion to Islam spread. His suggestion that archaeology offers a way of reaching surer conclusions about the rate of conversion assuredly has much to commend it, although current circumstances in parts of the Middle East as well as the continuing disdain of many archaeologists for later periods mean that its realisation is still a long way off. Pahlitzsch likewise notes the importance of archaeology for filling the gap left by the silence of the written sources regarding the fate of Christian communities in Anatolia. Wood argues that four main factors can explain the gradual conversion of Christians to Islam in the pre-Turkish Middle East: cultural pressure, taxation, discrimination and intermarriage. Certainly all these elements were present in medieval Anatolia too, but their relative degree of importance is much less clear. Several contributions in this volume highlight the role of cultural pressure in creating an environment conducive to conversion (see in particular, Peacock, Yıldız and Karamustafa). Taxation, on the other hand features much less prominently in scholarship. This may, of course reflect our sources, as we have very little financial data relating to medieval Anatolia. Certainly some Christian communities continued to thrive, but they existed in an Islamic legal framework, and even churches and monasteries were made into waqf, which was in part a mechanism for avoiding tax. On occasion Seljuq rule is actually said to have been more favourable to Christians than Byzantine;68 but how general this was must be debated; assuredly there were financial consequences to remaining an unbeliever in Muslim-ruled Anatolia at times – under, for instance, the Mongol Timurtash. But as yet we really do not understand how representative either of these extremes was. Discrimination also doubtless occurred in certain times and places, notwithstanding the prestigious offices held by some Christians, but again it hardly features in the research presented here. The final element, intermarriage, is also debatable. As Scott Redford notes in his contribution, Turkish scholarship has tended to favour the idea of mass-migration of Turks rather than intermarriage as contributing to Anatolia’s Islamisation, while other scholars have often seen marriage as producing a syncretic culture, and to a certain Christian-Muslim symbiosis. The contribution by Alex Beihammer opens the volume’s examination of the consequences of the Turkish invasions, concentrating on Anatolia in the late eleventh and early twelfth century. Beihammer’s use of Latin, Greek, Syriac and Armenian sources illustrates their potential to shed light on not just the fate of Christians under Turkish rule in a period almost entirely neglected by Muslim texts, but also on the emergence of Muslim society in Anatolia. Peter Cowe’s contribution concentrates on the relations between Armenians and Muslims over the eleventh to fourteenth centuries, showing how Armenian culture was profoundly affected by its encounter with Islam, its literature and even social structures permeated by Islamic influences. Redford’s chapter approaches the status of Christians from another perspective: in contrast to scholarship to date which has seen the spread of Islam as a result of Muslim intermarriage with Christian women as well as Turkish settlement, Redford uses thirteenth-century waqfiyyas to argue that unconverted Christian women played an important part in economic and social life in Muslim society in Seljuq Anatolia, as did other ‘marginal’ groups such as slaves. Slaves and economic life also feature in Preiser-Kapeller’s chapter, which, drawing on tools of network analysis, shows the complexity of the commercial relationships into which Anatolia was drawn in the thirteenth to early fifteenth centuries, and their consequences in producing ethnically and religiously diverse communities in emporia like Antalya on the Mediterranean coast. The contribution by Pahlitzsch, in contrast, focuses on a single confession, the Greek Orthodox community in Ephesus under the rule of the Turkish Aydınid dynasty, and in Nicaea under the early Ottomans. Pahlitzsch’s chapter illustrates the deficiencies of Vryonis’ paradigm of decline, and suggests – in line with Wood’s comments for the pre-Turkish period – that some Christian communities continued to prosper under Muslim domination. His chapter reinforces the impression that we must approach lamentations as to the disastrous consequences of Turkish rule in some Christian sources with a degree of circumspection. The second part of the volume examines ‘Artistic and Intellectual Encounters between Islam and Christianity’. The opening chapter by Rustam Shukurov argues that Byzantium was only open to Islamic cultural influences in a very limited and tightly controlled manner, although the situation may have changed somewhat by the fourteenth century. Eastmond, on the other hand, drawing on artistic and architectural evidence from eastern Anatolia, the Caucasus, the Jazira and neighbouring regions of the Middle East largely from the late twelfth to thirteenth centuries, argues for the existence of, at least at a popular level, a common cultural vocabulary shared between members of different faiths and confessions. Uyar examines the artistic legacy of thirteenth-century Cappadocia, a Christian-dominated region under Seljuq control, and shows how Christian painters were esteemed at the court and introduced Christian imagery into the manuscripts illustrated for their Turkish patrons. The final two chapters in this part turn from material culture to textual evidence. Peacock’s contribution examines interfaith relations from the perspective of an anti-Armenian polemic in an early thirteenth-century Persian text from Anatolia. Despite its polemical nature, the text suggests a profound knowledge on the part of the author concerning Armenian hagiography and legend as well as contemporary confessional debates at a time when the expansion of the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia in south-eastern Anatolia was threatening Seljuq interests. Rassi, on the other hand, shows how Christian theology was profoundly affected by its encounter with Islam, examining an early fourteenth-century Arabic treatise by Bishop ꜤAbdīshō‘ which highlights the extent to which the language of the Qurʾan and of Muslim theology influenced even tracts aimed at defending Christian practices. Together, the essays illustrate the diversity of exchanges, while underlining, as Shukurov does, that not every confession was equally open to Muslim influences. As Cowe’s earlier essay shows, Armenian culture (as well as Georgian) shows a much more obvious Islamic imprint than Byzantine does. The underlying reasons for these differing responses within Christianity should be investigated more thoroughly in the future. The concluding part of the volume turns to the formation of Islamic society in Anatolia, and in particular the role of Sufis and Sufism. Yıldırım, concentrating on western Anatolia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, examines the nature of Anatolian Islam, in particular as conceptualised by Köprülü and his critics, and argues against the clear distinction between Sunni and Shiʿite Islam that others have perceived in medieval Anatolia. Pfeiffer focuses on the central Anatolian town of Kırşehir under Mongol rule in the late thirteenth century, suggesting how the patronage of the Mongol commander Nūr al-Dīn ibn Jājā (Turk. Cacaoğlu) facilitated the development of Islamic institutions, and his relationship with Sufi groups. The final two chapters concentrate on Turkish sources. Yıldız examines the poet Gülşehri’s Turkish adaptation of the famous Persian poem, the Manṭiq al-Ṭayr by ʿAṭṭār. She argues that Gulşehri’s reworking of the Persian classic of Sufism adopts the tone of a religious polemic, perhaps with the intention of inciting Muslims to combat kufr, unbelief, in the predominantly Christian region of Cappadocia. The final chapter, by Karamustafa, looks at the prose epic vita of the largely legendary Sufi saint Sarı Saltuk (late thirteenth century?) and examines it as a source for Muslim attitudes towards Christianity and Islamisation, suggesting that for the author of this text, becoming Muslim was simply a matter of shedding a few superficial aspects of practice. Christians – even the Pope – are depicted as secret Muslims, and religion is reduced to ‘communal political allegiance’. As Karamustafa puts it, ‘[s]alvation is simply a matter of right belonging, and yesterday’s ‘cursed’ Christians suddenly become today’s ‘righteous’ believers simply by uttering the testimony of faith’. Such attitudes must have played a significant part in making conversion to Islam more attractive to non-Muslims, for all the lack of understanding or interest in Christianity they evince. Clearly a volume such as this cannot do more than aspire to offer some snapshots of religious diversity and inter-confessional relations at different times and places within medieval Anatolia under Muslim rule. It is hoped, however, that this book will serve to illustrate the progress that is currently being made both in developing new conceptual frameworks for studying the great historical transformation that is the Islamisation of Anatolia, and in uncovering new sources and fresh approaches to them.
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