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138 Pages
Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul explores biography writing and dream narratives in seventeenth-century Istanbul. It focuses on the prominent biographer ‘Ata’I (d. 1637) and with his help shows how learned circles narrated dreams to assess their position in the Ottoman enterprise. This book demonstrates that dreams provided biographers not only with a means to form learned communities in a politically fragile landscape but also with a medium to debate the correct career paths and social networks in late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Istanbul.
By adopting a comparative approach, this book engages with current scholarly dialogues about life-writing, dreams, and practices of remembrance in Habsburg Spain, Safavid Iran, Mughal India and Ming China. Recent studies have shown the shared rhythms between these contemporaneous dynasties and the Ottomans, and there is now a strong interest in comparative approaches to examining cultural life. This first English-language monograph on Ottoman dreamscapes addresses this interest and introduces a world where dreams changed lives, the dead appeared in broad daylight, and biographers invited their readers to the gardens of remembrance.
Ash Niyazioglu is Assistant Professor of History at Kog University, Istanbul. After receiving her PhD from Harvard University in 2003, she taught at the University of Oxford and was a fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg Institute of Advanced Study at Berlin. She works on early modern Ottoman history with a special interest in the lives of poets, scholars, and Sufis of Istanbul.
Acknowledgements
Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul marks the culmination of a long journey into the world of the poets, scholars and Sufis of early modern Istanbul. I thank Cemal Kafadar for introducing me to the wonders of this world and for being such a vast source of inspiration over many years. Mehmet Sinan Niyazioglu, Rossen Djagalov and Zeynep Yiirekli have kindly accepted ‘Ata’l into their lives and commented vigorously on my writings at different stages of this project. Without their love and unfailing support, this book would not have been possible.
It was a great pleasure to share my drafts with Zeynep Altok, Emine Fetvaci, Gloria Fisk and Ilham Khuri-Makdisi. I have been very fortunate to have such amazing friends. I cannot thank them enough for love, laughter and fun as well as their invaluable feedback. This book also owes a great deal to the support of friends, colleagues and former students. I especially would like to thank Hatice Aynur, Abby Comstock Gay, Sooyong Kim, Selim Sirri Kuru, Lucienne Thys-Senocak, Kerem Tinaz, Gérkem Ozizmirli, Oya Pancaroglu, Mehmet Polatel, Alexis Rappas, Giinsel Renda, Dana Sajdi, Michael Sheridan, Derin Terzioglu, Ahmet Tunc Sen, Max Weiss and Ozge Yildiz. I am grateful to Rhoads Murphey for providing support at a crucial stage of the project and making the publication possible. I thank them all for many insightful comments and suggestions.
During my teaching and research in Oxford, Berlin and Istanbul, Eugene Rogan, Celia Kerslake, Barbara Kellner-Heinkele, George Khalil and Cengiz Karli provided inspiration and encouragement, as always. I am also immensely grateful to my former mentors Nevra Necipoglu, Giilru Necipoglu and our late professor Sinasi Tekin for showing me ways to engage in a conversation with past lives. G6ntil Alpay Tekin has been an amazing guide into bewildering realms of Ottoman poetry. I thank them with all my heart.
Another great source of support for this work has been the assistance of the staff and directors of libraries where I conducted research. I especially thank the librarians of Siileymaniye Library, Topkapi Palace Museum Library, Bogazici University Library and Ko¢ University Library in Istanbul, Widener Library at Harvard University, Bodleian Library at Oxford University, and Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. I was fortunate to work at these collections thanks to financial support from the Kog University Harvard-Kog Visiting Scholar Program, Bilim Akademisi Young Scientist Award, British Institute Research Grant and a Wissenchaftskolleg zu Berlin fellowship.
I would like to thank dear friends Martin Alagam, Oytun Altasli, Serpil Bagci, Jed Boyer, Ozge Dursun, Gloria Fisk, Scott Redford and Sinan Unver for their support and understanding.I am grateful to Rossen Djagalov for making the exploration of history and imagination together such a great joy. Thank you all for being patient with me when I turned into a monster during the writing process and cheers to our many wonderful nights and days (how many years!). I also thank Ines, Alberto and Alejandro Garcia for making the beautiful Gijon home and Carlos Garcia for making the world an incredibly beautiful place.
Finally, I thank my parents Emine and Yahya Altunel and my brother Mehmet Sinan Niyazioglu who have supported me with their patience, good humor, and love. How fortunate have I been to share life with such wonderful people! It is to them I dedicate this book with love and gratitude.
Note on transliteration and manuscripts
Source material quoted in this book is predominantly Ottoman Turkish, for which I use modern Turkish orthography with the diacritical marks listed above. The same diacritical marks are used for Arabic and Persian, with the exceptions noted in the parentheses. The Arabic definitive article is transliterated as al- for Arabic and Persian texts, as in al-Shaqa’iq alNu‘maniyy4d, instead of the Ottoman Turkish Sakda’ikti’n-Nu ‘mdniyya.
For names of places, people and groups, diacritical marks are omitted but poets’ pen-namesare transliterated fully. For Ottoman Turkish geographical names, the modern Turkish orthography is adopted, except when there is an English equivalent for the latter, as in Istanbul instead of Istanbul. Anglicized versions of Ottoman, Arabic and Persian words are used as they appear in the Merriam-Webster dictionary: kadi, ulema, vizier, and so forth, the exceptions being medrese instead of madrassa, and Quran instead of Koran.
Titles of works are repeated in a shortened form after the first mention.
DRAKA
At the time of the completion of the Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul, the much-needed critical edition of the Hadda’ikti’l-Hakd’ik is still unpublished. I am grateful to Suat Donuk for sharing with me his unpublished transliteration, Nev‘i-zGde Atdyi-Hada@’iku’l-Haka’ik ft Tekmileti’s-Sakd’ik (Inceleme-Metin), which he submitted as a PhD thesis to Celal Bayar University in 2015. Regrettably, this meticulous transliteration was still in preparation for publication at the time of the completion of my project. Thus, all references are made to the published edition currently in use: the facsimile of the 1851-52 printed edition prepared by Abdiilkadir Ozcan in 1989.
There are 34 complete and 19 incomplete copies of the Hada’ik manuscripts recorded in our library catalogues today. Among them, we have an autograph copy comprised of 5 out of 8 volumes in separate manuscripts. In my citations from the Hada’ik, I use this incomplete autograph copy (Siileymaniye Library, Esad Efendi, 2341, 2342, 2344, 2344 and Istanbul Arastirmalari Enstittisti Library Yazmalar $R 000182) and compare it with Suat Donuk’s edition, which is based on three complete Hadd’ik manuscripts (Stileymaniye Library Esad Efendi 2309, Topkapi Palace Library Revan 1438, and Edirne Selimiye Library 4702).
I thank Ali Emre Ozyildirimli for bringing to my attention the previously unknown autograph copy of the second volume at Istanbul Arastirmalari Enstitiisti Library.
Introduction
This book explores the practices of biography writing and dream narratives in seventeenthcentury Istanbul. It focuses on the prominent biographer Nev’izade ‘Ata’I (d. 1637) and with his help shows how seventeenth-century learned circles narrated dreams to present their views on debated issues of their period.' If we could have accompanied a biographer like ‘Ata’I on one of his sojourns in Istanbul, we would have listened to accounts of dreams shared among friends at garden parties, students in medrese rooms, family members at homes and Sufis in their lodges. The significance of dreams for Sufi orders and their acceptance among Islamic scholars must have contributed to this dream exchange.
Not all dreams were trusted but those considered as divine messages were cherished and circulated in various genres, including first-person narratives, chronicles and poetry. Biographers participated in this milieu and included dreams in their works. They referred to dreams as mirrors that reflected the divine world that was hidden from ordinary eyes. By paying attention to the dreams that biographers chose to include in their works, we can begin to see what they thought were hidden aspects of life but needed to be revealed.
Understanding how biographers such as ‘Ata’1 talked about lives through dreams is important as there is a growing scholarly interest in Ottoman life stories. A small number of scholars have been exploring early modern Ottoman intellectual pursuits through the lives of poets, scholars and Sufis of the empire.* This biographical turn has resulted in a number of recent studies which discuss major transformations in Ottoman history focusing on individual lives.
They examine, for instance, the legal history of sixteenth-century Ayntab through court cases of peasant women;? warfare in the Indian Ocean through the policies of grand viziers and the actions of corsairs;* and imperial building and art projects through the political struggles of the members of the ruling elite.? With creative archival work, these studies have contributed greatly to our understanding of the relationship between individual life stories and larger political and social changes.° We are yet to explore, however, what the Ottomans themselves chose to tell about their own lives and those of others as it is often through life stories that they revealed their intellectual world. This book aims to address this omission.
Like their contemporaries in other parts of the world, Ottoman learned circles were keen on writing about themselves and recording their biographies in collected lives.’ Sufis, scholars and poets appeared, life by life, in biographical dictionaries, a genre of life-writing produced in the Islamic world since the eighth century.® Biographers, who were often members of learned circles themselves, brought together hundreds of subjects from their peers and predecessors in extensive collections. Following earlier Arabic and Persian works as their models, biographers presented information about the education, careers, works and characters of their subjects as well as colorful anecdotal stories.? Supplement after supplement, they created an almost continuous tradition from the mid-sixteenth to the early twentieth century.
In the development of the genre, the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were a crucial period. This was a time of empire building during which a bureaucratic state apparatus was formulated and new political actors questioned established authorities.!° As the learned circles strove to advance their position in the hierarchic state structure, they sought ideal guides to promising paths. Biographers played an important role in this quest. In their biographies, they promoted what they perceived as exemplary lives and condemned others.
Among them, ‘Ata’I’s Hadda’ikti’|-Hakd’ik fi Tekmiletii’s-Saka’ik (Gardens of Truths in the Completion of the Peonies) (c. 1634) is the most comprehensive collection of this period and offers fascinating portraits of controversial lives in the early seventeenth century. It consists of 1133 biographical entries of the sheikhs and ulema, the scholars and teachers of Islamic law (sing. ‘alim), who died between the years 1558 to 1634. The surviving dated copies suggest that the Hadd@’ik began to receive readers’ attention shortly after it was completed.!! ‘Ata’I’s contemporaries used and praised it often. According the bibliophile Katip Celebi (d. 1657), for instance, ‘Ata’I moved his pen with eloquence and skill. Katip Celebi wrote, “nothing among the unique and subtle points was left out in his writing. Thus, a comprehensive history of the ulema and the sultans of their times in seven volumes appeared. Nothing of the same caliber was composed in the lands of Rim.”!? ‘Ata’i’s meticulous record of curriculum vitae, analyses of character traits and anecdotal stories about over one thousand lives is a remarkable achievement that offers an insider’s view of early modern Ottoman learned circles.
In this book, I find it useful to approach biographical dictionaries as “ life-writing,” a term used to describe the recording of selves, memories and experiences, whether one’s own or another’s.!° As the Oxford life-writing group argues, “life-writing encompasses everything from the complete life to the day-in-the-life, from the fictional to the factional. It embraces the lives of objects and institutions as well as the lives of individuals, families and groups. Lifewriting includes autobiographies, memoirs, letters, diaries, journals (written and documentary), anthropological data, oral testimonies, and eye-witness accounts.
This comprehensive definition allows me to examine biographical dictionaries in dialogue with new research on Ottoman first-person writing.!° Studies have shown the diverse ways in which Ottomans talked about their lives in diaries, dictionaries, chronicles and miscellanea collections (mecmu‘a), but biographical dictionaries, a major genre of Ottoman literature, have rarely been studied as sources of life-writing. We are yet to explore what the biographers wanted to say and what the contemporaneous readers sought on the pages of their books.!©
A major reason for this neglect is the difficulty of seeing how the biographers observed and commented on their world. It is difficult because it requires the suspension of our contemporaneous expectations from life-writing. Since factual information is what we usually prioritize today, in our readings of these books we often focus on the parts which we perceive as factual aspects of a biography. The Hada’ik has been especially prone to this kind of reading mainly for gathering data.
With Abdiilkadir Ozcan’s publication of a facsimile edition and comprehensive index of the nineteenth-century printed copy, the Hadd’ik has become a major reference source for modern historians. Recently, a much needed edition and transliteration was prepared by Suat Donuk.!” We also have Adnan Karabeyoglu’s unpublished dissertation on its style, Zahid Sidki Giivemli’s bibliography of manuscripts in Istanbul libraries and Nejat Yeter’s transliteration of the biographies of poets in the Hada’ik.'® Apart from these valuable contributions, there has not been any scholarly interest in the Hada’ik itself as a subject of intellectual history. Like many other biographical works, the Hada’ik has been consulted almost only for the rich factual information it contains.
In his study of seventeenth-century Ottoman history writing, Gabriel Piterberg has shown how Ottoman texts are not unstructured collections of facts but rather constitute an interpretive and judgmental narrative discourse. As an agenda for future studies, he proposes to approach the live record left to us by the Ottomans to find not only transparent informants but also engaging interlocutors.!? In this book, I follow Piterberg’s call and argue that a biographical work such as the Hada’ik can offer us much more insight into the lives of Ottoman learned circles when we pay attention to what we tend to consider “non-factual” aspects.*° Rather than a source for data-mining, I examine ‘Ata’I’s text as an exemplar of the biographical dictionary genre and explore its features. In such a perspective, instead of being neglected as non-factual material, topoi inserted narratives such as dreams, or other such formal features, become central to our understanding of the role of the Ottoman imaginary.
Dream narratives are an important example. Because we conceptualize historical context mostly as the social relations of the here-and-now, we have almost exclusively studied thisworldly experiences mentioned in the Hada’ik and neglected otherworldly encounters. However, when we neglect the accounts of experiences that transgress the limits of the material world such as dreams, we see only one facet of the recounted lives. ‘Ata’I related these accounts to comment on the biographies and present a different vista. His Hada’ik is a book of careers where appointments and social ties defined one’s hierarchical position among the learned elite. Yet, it is also a book where the dreamers woke up to another sight of their world, a fearsome and restless world where social networks and career paths were turned upside down.
Recent studies on the early modern Habsburg and Safavid dreams are particularly helpful for understanding the function of dreams in Ottoman biographical works. Rather than discussing the authenticity of dreams, these studies focus on the function of the dream reports as a medium of communication. The reported dream in early modern Spain, as Ann Marie Plane and Leslie Tuttle argue, was an effective vehicle in placing political information in a tangible form accessible to an audience across a broad spectrum.*! As studied by Luis R. Corteguer, Maria V. Jordan and R. K. Britton, dreams became a means to say things about early modern Habsburg society that were not easy to share otherwise, and thus voiced powerful sociopolitical critiques.** Similarly, for early modern Iran, Sholeh A. Quinn shows that dream reports provided a productive vehicle for Safavid historians to communicate new political ideas and discuss changing views on dynastic legitimization.
A closer look at the dream accounts in the Hada’ik allows us to see current debates as well. In this case, the primary topics of debate are contested career paths and social networks. Whereas the members of the learned circles followed different career paths simultaneously in the early sixteenth century, the bureaucratization of the mid-sixteenth century resulted in “the hardening of the artilleries” and made it more difficult to switch between different career paths.** This development seems to have resulted in a close examination of career choices and the social networks that sustain them. Biographers partook in this milieu. They narrated dreams of deceased learned men to promote what they perceived as correct paths and ideal guides. “Words,” ‘Ata’ wrote, “are the water of life that can revive the dead.”2° But which dead did he want to bring back? For whom, and why? These questions take us to the complex web of relations between the worlds of the living and the dead, which are bridged by the dreams.
Why call the dead?
For ‘Ata’1, deceased Ottoman learned men were hidden treasures in tombs, waiting to be brought out. In his introduction to the Hada’ik, he wrote how his acquaintances had pointed out the life-giving characteristics of biography writing. They complained that whereas the learned men of the Persian and Arab lands had been revived through pleasant words in biographies, those of Ottoman lands were almost forgotten except for a few lines on their tombstones. As an Ottoman ‘alim he agreed with them. At the time, he had already completed two prestigious literary tasks — a divan collection of poetry and a series of five mesnevis, called a Hamse — and thus must have found himself ready to take the challenge.*° Although we do not know whether he had a specific patron in mind, he may have thought that such a collection would interest the chief mufti of the period who could reward him with a promotion. In 1632, he began his biographical project. He set out to save deceased Ottoman learned men from oblivion and bring them back to the world for his readers.”
In his study of early modern European exemplarity, Timothy Hampton discusses how the humanist historians saw the past as a reservoir of models for present action.~° Like their contemporaries in Europe, the early modern Ottoman literati also scrutinized past lives for examples to follow and cautionary tales to avoid. “The science of history,” writes ‘Ata’I’s father, the scholar Nev‘i (d. 1599), “shows the exemplary of the world and presents insight into humankind. By providing acquaintances with events of the times, it makes one experienced about matters and prudent about affairs of the people.
There is no limit to its benefits.”*? Similarly, Task6prizade (d. 1561), the author of the Arabic biographical dictionary alShaqa’iq al-Nu‘mdniyya (Crimson Peonies) describes “the object of history’ as “the conditions of the individuals of the past, such as prophets, saints, scholars, sages, poets, kings, sultans and others.” For him, the usefulness is “to learn from those conditions, to seek advice from them and to form the habit of experience through acquaintance with the vicissitudes of time.”?! Mehmed Haki (d. 1657), the seventeenth-century translator of Task6prizade’s Shaqa’iq into Ottoman Turkish, presents the book also as a source of models for those who devote themselves to the cultivation of knowledge. *
Seventeenth-century readers such as Katip Celebi, Pecevi (d. 1650) and Kalender Pasha (d.1616) seem to have agreed with these biographers’ suggestions. In a treatise on current debates, Katip Celebi cites an example from the Shaqa’iq while advising students to devote themselves completely to their studies and not to seek careers in the state service.* Like him, the historian Pecevi cites a biographical entry to present a cautionary tale. He writes how he consulted the biographical dictionary of Jami (d. 1492) to reflect on the consequences of an unjust execution. When he heard about the execution of the Naksbendi sheikh Rimi, a sheikh whom he personally knew and admired, he sought Jami’s work from his library and read the entry about Majdaddin al-Baghdadi (d. 1219) as an example of divine wrath brought about by such executions.** The topos of praising the benefits of learning about model lives from the past could be also found in Kalender Pasha’s compilation of stories from the lives of the prophets.»
This interest in the past and such readings of history are, of course, not unique to the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Ottoman readers and writers. Yet, a number of scholars have noted how the intellectual circles from this period were especially interested in seeking models from the past. This was a period when a number of Ottoman authors perceived a decline in their society and sought solutions in the exemplary models from history. As discussed by Cemal Kafadar, when the slowdown of the Ottoman expansion was accompanied by changes in political organization of the state, late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century ruling circles felt a threat to their privileged positions. Perceiving their times as a departure from the Ottoman state’s achievements in sustaining a powerful central authority in the sixteenth century, they reflected longingly upon the administrative practices of previous generations and posited as exemplary models the previous sultans like Siileyman and his viziers.
Meanwhile, other groups had different suggestions for whom to follow. The Shariaminded reformers known as Kadizadelis adopted the life of the Prophet as their model, and criticized beliefs and practices that they considered to be corrupt innovations (bid ‘at), responsible for the troubles of their society.°” Different members of Ottoman society participated in these debates and circulated their views on whom to follow through various genres. In his study of seventeenth-century chronicles, Rhoads Murphey, for instance, has discussed how “it became the definitive role of the seventeenth-century historian, as intellectual, to use his powers of observation to provide a critique of social mores and to monitor the moral performance of those entrusted with positions of power and authority.”°**
Dream narratives in biographical works, I argue, should also be considered in the context of this milieu. Early seventeenth century authors seem to have developed a new kind of interest in dream narratives and used them as rhetorical tools to comment on their contemporaneous situation. In a recent study, Ahmet Tung Sen has shown how a dream report provided its author, the prominent poet and judge Veysi (d. 1628) with a creative medium to partake in seventeenthcentury debates. Veysi narrated a dream to argue that the political troubles of his times were not unique to this period but could be observed throughout history. In this dream, Veysi found himself listening to a conversation between Alexander Dhu’l-Qarnayn and Sultan Ahmed (r.1603-1617). He reported how Alexander gave the sultan many examples from history concerning other hard times. Thus, the dream report allowed a seventeenth-century author to connect with an exemplary figure from the past and discuss his position on the perceived contemporary problems. Like his colleague Veysi, ‘Ata’I narrated dreams to connect with past lives and promote his views on the right guides to follow in early seventeenth-century Istanbul.
The question then is: where does ‘Ata’I take us when we enter his book of deceased learned men and follow him through dreams between this world and the hereafter?
The dreamscape of Ottoman biographers
In this book, I examine the dreams in the Hada’ik as a medium of debate on career choices and the social networks which sustained them. Before discussing which dreams ‘Ata’ chose to include in his work and how he narrated them to address contemporaneous audience interests, I would like to briefly discuss the significance of dreams for ‘Ata’I. Our contemporaneous understanding of dreams would have probably surprised seventeenth-century dreamers and biographers like him. Whereas many of us may not consider dreams as a trustworthy way of acquiring knowledge, recent research has shown how early modern Ottoman writers often present dreams as an important cognitive tool in which divine knowledge, otherwise impenetrable to the human intellect and sense perceptions, is unveiled.*? Like many of his contemporaries, ‘Ata’I also followed the renowned mystic Ibn ‘Arabi’s (d. 1240) views on dreams.“° For him, sleep is the envy of the awakened; its light opens the eye of the heart, brings hidden beauties and catches true points. These divine lights remove the veil of darkness and reveal the pure mirror of revelation. Such dreams were considered as divine messages, shared with others and recorded in writing.*!
Our knowledge of Ottoman ways of remembering, recording and circulating dreams is limited. Yet we do know that Sufi sheikhs played an important role in these dream cultures. Like many other practitioners of Sufism throughout history, Ottoman sheikhs, especially those from the Halveti and Bayrami orders, used dreams in the training of their disciples. The Halveti sheikh Sinan Efendi (d. 1529), for instance, wanted disciples to tell their sheikh all their dreams. The sheikhs listened to the dreams of their disciples to monitor spiritual states, and the disciples paid close attention to their messages. The initiation story of Ibrahim Tenniri (d. 1482) demonstrates the significance of dreams for the disciple—sheikh relationship. It is also an interesting example of the special spiritual practices used to induce and remember dreams. According to his biographer, when Ibrahim Tenniri wanted to become a disciple of the Bayrami sheikh Aksemseddin (d. 1459), the sheikh asked him about his dreams. As he could not remember any, he was placed in a retreat for forty days. The retreat worked: he had a hundred dreams and remembered each with great precision.** Since Sufism was well spread among Ottoman society, many men and women must have engaged in similar practices. We even have written records of some of their experiences such as the dream diaries of a sultan and woman mystic who sent their dreams to Halveti sheikhs. “°
Ottoman biographers participated in this dreamscape by contributing to the circulation of selected dreams. Although they did not include dreams frequently in their works, they narrated them to explain significant junctures in the lives of their subjects. Biographers, as Isabel Moreira has shown in the case of medieval European hagiographers, did not relate dreams randomly but selected them according to the specific areas of audience interest.* Ottoman biographers were also selective. Many different kinds of dreams must have been shared among their circles. While the seventeenth-century mystic Asiye Hatun, for instance, recorded her dreams about how she struggled with worldly desires, the traveler Evliya Celebi (d. after 1683) narrated dreams shared among his patron and his wife which foretold her death from childbirth.*° Ottoman biographers, however, were mostly interested in dreams about careers and social networks. Should one be a Sufi sheikh, a kadi, a musician? Whose guidance should one follow? They answered these questions by narrating dreams. Like the writers of early modern German self-narratives studied by Gabriele Jancke, early modern Ottoman biographers were mainly concerned with professional lives and wanted to share dreams almost only about careers.
It is perhaps not surprising to find dreams about careers in a book like the Hada’ik. This was an era of empire-building during which a bureaucratic state-apparatus was formulated and Ottoman learned circles were integrated into the central state-apparatus. The biographers, their subjects and readers, as much as we can infer from rare ownership records and marginalia in manuscripts, partook in this project. Like ‘Ata’1, a provincial kadi, they received positions from Istanbul, many of them navigated in a centrally regulated and competitive system of appointments. In their rank-conscious world, career concerns seem to have played an important role. Biographers responded to this concern. They presented detailed records of appointments and networks — and also career dreams — carefully in their works.
The social relationships that sustained these career paths were also important for the biographers. Although often overlooked in the rich scholarship on the history of dreams, a significant function of dreams is to establish, or to enrich, social ties.4” We see this function in the dream accounts of Ottoman biographers. Many of them narrated the circulation of the dreams as carefully and in as much detail as the dream itself. In these narratives, through the figure of the dream interpreter, biographers highlighted the authority of particular individuals and their role in the professional lives of their subjects. Significantly, biographers were selective in the kinds of bonds they wanted to present.
They did not record just any relationship but chose to highlight the social ties. For instance, Tasképrizade, who wrote a biographical dictionary about Sufi sheikhs and the ulema, narrated almost only the career dreams of the ulema interpreted by the Sufi sheikhs, showing how these two groups were related. Other biographers had different authority figures to promote as ideal guides in their projects. Whereas in his biographical collection of the Sufi sheikhs, Hulvi (d. 1654) focused on the ways dreams bind disciples with their sheikhs, and ‘Asik Celebi (d. 1571), in his biographical dictionary of poets, narrated almost exclusively the dreams shared among poet friends.*®
But why narrate dreams about careers and social networks? Ottoman biographers, I will argue, used dream narratives as a medium of debate to present their position and criticize others. For instance, the bureaucrat Latiff (d. 1582) narrated how a judge withdrew from his career after a dream of Judgment Day. In the dream, the judge saw water mills crushing the heads of corrupt judges running on the blood of their victims. Ulema biographers like Tasképrizade and ‘Asik Celebi, however, reported the sanction of their judgeship by the Prophet and its rewards in afterlife in their dreams.*? Thus, biographers like Latif, Tasképrizade and ‘Asik Celebi narrated dreams to confirm the higher status of the paths they endorsed and to voice their criticism of those they objected. Thus, they partook in a long tradition of narrating dreams for praise and polemic in Islamic life-writing. Medieval Arab and Persian biographers, whose works Ottoman biographers took as models, presented dreams to confirm the special status and authority of individual Sufis and jurists as well as to authenticate spiritual genealogies, mystical orders and legal schools.°? While the Ottoman biographers participated in this tradition, they focused on the career choices of their subjects. When we look at their dream realm, we see the significance of bonds ina fragile world where they ask, “Where am I?” and “Who will help me here?”
Here, my readers may question whether these dreams were actually dreamt or whether they were literary fabrications. These questions require the much-needed examination of the ways Ottoman authors represented reality and claimed the veracity of oneiric experiences, which are beyond the scope of this project. I would like to note, however, that Ottoman biographers rarely raised questions about the veracity of the dream accounts.°! When a biographer did not agree with a dream account, he either omitted the incident or suggested a competing narrative. This is not to say that biographers like ‘Ata’ believed in all dreams indiscriminately. They, as many other men and women of the past, were anxious to identify the “true” dreams which carried divine messages, and set them apart from “confused” dreams caused by bodily humors, and more importantly, from dreams sent by the devil to lead the dreamer astray. One way to separate a “true” dream from a demonically-inspired dream or a vain imagining was the clarity and directness of its message. Significantly, almost all the dreams ‘Ata’I narrated have clear messages and the majority are “literal dreams” that deliver their message promptly. Thus, rather than authenticating the experience as an actual dream, the Ottoman biographers seem to have been more concerned with sharing its message with their readers.
Rather than discussing the authenticity of dreams, recent studies on early modern dreams, as discussed above, have focused on the function of the dream reports as a medium of communication. Following their example, in this book I do not discuss whether these accounts were fabricated or not, but focus instead on what the biographers wanted to share with their readers about past lives by narrating them. Gotfried Hagen has argued that the melding of the past, present and future in the dream time allowed the dreamer to meditate on their lives and understand it as part of a divinely ordered and meaningful history.°* In her study of modern Egyptian dreams, the anthropologist Amira Milittermaier has also examined the interconnectedness of the dreams and shown how they provided the dreamers with a medium to connect with saints, the Prophet as well as sheikhs, family and friends. I also see Ottoman dreams as bridges between different realms.” Dreams, I argue, united the living and the dead, the past and the future, the human and the divine in seventeenth-century Istanbul. Through the complex web of relations between this world and the hereafter, the biographers displayed to their readers what was hidden and what needed to be revealed.
Scope and outline
This book aims to contribute to new studies in Ottoman and Middle Eastern history by bringing together three emerging fields, which have often been treated in isolation from each other. First, it contributes to the small but growing field of the history of Ottoman dreams. Studies by Cemal Kafadar, Ozgen Felek, Gotfried Hagen and Dror Ze’evi have shown the significance of dreams for Ottoman lives, the variety of genres in which they were recorded, and how they can be studied to explore Ottoman lives.°** But we have yet to comprehend why dreams were narrated to explain significant junctures in life stories. I engage in a dialogue with the studies on dreams in early modern life-writing and discuss the ways biographers narrated dreams to promote their views on contested career choices of their times.
By cross-referencing this study of Ottoman life-writing and dreams with recent scholarship on Habsburg, Safavid, Mughal and Ming dreams, I hope to inscribe Ottoman dreams into the history of the early modern world. Comparative studies in economic and political life of the early modern world have shown the shared rhythms between contemporaneous dynasties and there is now a Strong interest in comparative approaches to cultural lives of the period. Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul aims to address this interest and explores the parallels among early modern dreamscapes.
Second, Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul contributes to recent studies on the ways Ottomans observed and commented upon their lives. Pioneering historians have examined the narrative strategies of Ottoman historians to better understand early modern Ottoman views on state and society.°° Piterberg, for instance, has shown how seventeenth-century bureaucrathistorians engaged in a vigorous debate on controversial political events in their chronicles.%© More recently, Dana Sajdi has explored how people outside of the ruling elite also partook in this tradition and shared their opinions by composing chronicles.°” Inspired by these historians, I aim to widen the scope of current scholarship by suggesting Ottoman life-writing as a rich source to explore early modern Ottomans’ ways of looking at their world. Whereas previous scholarship has mostly concentrated on the scribes and their this-worldly experiences based on chronicles, my book focuses on connection between this- and otherworldly experiences through life-writing and proposes to examine not just scribes but also other members of Ottoman learned circles.
Although some scholars have examined the institutional structure of the Ottoman learned establishment, few have explored what the learned circles wanted to tell about their lives, and therefore found significant about their world, systematically and in depth. For this inquiry, I build on the scholarship of Arabic and Persian life-writing, which has explored how different interest groups voiced their competing claims to authority by writing biographies.°? We can also identify competing representations of Ottoman lives in biography writing. Recent studies by Ali Anooshar and Guy Burak as well as earlier contributions by Walter Andrews, Hans Georg Majer, Necai Gamm and Barbara Flemming have also shown how an Ottoman biographer would choose certain stories to tell for a purpose, and these choices reveal the views, positions, agendas and interests of its author.©? In dialogue with this scholarship, I explore how Ottoman biographers narrated dreams to voice the anxieties of the careerconscious ruling elite, and how they presented their search for guides in a medium of debate.
Through this research, Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul aims to further our knowledge of the formation of communities of Sufis, scholars and poets in early modern Istanbul. In her pioneering study on the function of Ottoman hagiographybwriting, Zeynep Yirekli has shown how Bektasi hagiographers narrated saints’ lives to link diverse social groups and establish communal solidarity in Anatolia and Balkans at a time of persecution.®! Her work presents how much we can learn from hagiography writing about community building. My book contributes to this line of research. By mostly focusing on inter-personal relations, I examine institutions and spaces that sustained learned communities. I discuss the ways learned circles sought to establish solidarity among diverse groups of Sufis and scholars in a fragile political landscape. Biographers, I argue, struggled to bring their learned communities together by establishing bonds between the living and the dead.
Finally, this book aims to contribute to the writing of Islamic history through the lens of Sufi lives. My examination of a seventeenth-century judge’s view of Sufi sheikhs is one of the first book-length studies of the relationship of Sufi sheikhs and the ulema in the early modern Middle East, a crucial relationship, which has been often pointed out but rarely examined in depth. Although Sufism’s broad reach to great numbers and its prominent place in the literary and intellectual production are well known in our field, studies about the roles of Sufi sheikhs in Ottoman society are still rare. Innovative research projects have analyzed the social construction of sainthood covering a wide region from Morocco to South Asia.°* In Ottoman studies, scholars such as Ahmet Karamustafa, John Curry, Derin Terzioglu, Ahmet Yasar Ocak and Deniz Calis Kural have contributed to this new avenue of research and explored the practices and teachings of Ottoman practitioners of Sufism.® Others, such as Alberto Fabio Ambrose, Nathalie Clayer, Dina Legall, Resat Ongdren and Necdet Yilmaz, have provided us with in-depth surveys of selected orders and their changing relationship with the ruling elite.“ Since they have focused mostly on the self-representation of Sufi communities, we have yet to explore how different communities within Ottoman society perceived Sufi sheikhs, especially during periods such as the early seventeenth century, when Sufi beliefs and practices were highly criticized. My book aims to bridge this gap by discussing the role of dreams in establishing bonds between Sufis and the ulema when competing paths were under careful scrutiny.
SRR
To explore what ‘Ata’I wanted to share with his readers by narrating dreams of the Sufis and the ulema, I examine the language of dreams in biographical writing and thereby introduce my readers to this biographer’s milieu where dreams changed lives, the dead appeared in broad daylight and biographers invited their readers to the gardens of remembrance. Chapter One provides the first in-depth analyses of a seventeenth-century Ottoman writer’s ways of speaking about his literary pursuits through dreams. I focus on three individuals: ‘Ata’1’s father Nev‘l, his friend Fa’izi (d. 1621) and the sheikh ‘Uryani Mehmed Dede (d. 1590) whose support he singled out in his introductions to his narrative poetry (mesnevis). Rather than ignoring introductory passages for being common topoi, as is often done, I take these three relationships as starting points to discuss the ways ‘Ata’I claimed his ties to early seventeenthcentury literary networks. ‘Ata’I explained his reasons for composition when he narrated his conversations with the dead in his dreams. Thus, the chapter revolves around his otherworldly experiences and explores how he situated himself as a writer between this world and the hereafter by narrating his own dreams to other ulema poets of his time.
In this novel examination of the closely linked web of fathers, friends and Sufi sheikhs and its role in the production of early modern Ottoman literature, I argue that the reminiscences ‘Ata’I chose in writing about these three men are not random stories, but a carefully constructed attempt to promote himself among the ulema elite. I identify the literary group to which ‘Ata’? belonged, and re-construct his social network from a paper trail of letters, odes, chronograms and invective poetry. My examination of this rich and often neglected material shows how ‘Ata’I claimed a place for himself as the “poet-son-of-a-poet” and searched for support from his father’s circles for whom Fa’izi and ‘Uryani Mehmed Dede were also important. This was a difficult quest in a world where death, dismissal and even executions often shattered social networks. ‘Ata’I, however, was keen to preserve and perpetuate these delicate ties and called attention to the importance of bonds beyond death. He highlighted the role of the deceased Ottoman learned men in his literary pursuits through accounts of his dreams and presented himself as a custodian of their memory in a fragile world.
After introducing the biographer in the first chapter, Chapter Two turns to the biographical work. My first aim here is to understand the meaning of early seventeenth-century Ottoman biographical dictionaries for their authors. Prompted by ‘Ata’1’s decision to call his book a “garden” (the Hadd@’ikti’l-Haka’k translates as Gardens of Truths), I scrutinize the frequent use of garden imagery throughout the work. In this first detailed discussion of early modern Ottoman views on biography writing, I examine how ‘Ata’! presented his subjects literally as plants who depended on their gardener to live. Focusing on the Hada’ik’s formal aspects, I argue that ‘Ata’I described the dynastic, hierarchic and exclusive garden of the learned elite. I develop this analysis by using a broad variety of narrative poetry (mesnevi), Sufi treatises and advice literature manuscripts to better understand the Hadd@’ik and its cultural context.
Even a quick glance at the Hada’ ik reveals that this book is not a realm of equals: length and embellished style separate the high-ranking officials from their lower-ranking peers. Here I show how language plays a crucial role in delineating one’s place in the rank-conscious world of the Ottoman ruling elite and cannot be ignored as “empty rhetoric,” as is often done in Ottoman studies. I also discuss ‘Ata’I’s selection criteria and argue that contrary to the common assumption in the field, the Hada’ik is not a comprehensive and objective account of Ottoman learned men, but an Istanbul-centered collection. I examine the ways he brought together ulema and sheikhs from various different learned communities and how he presented them as members of the imperial social order. The last section of this chapter focuses on one biographical entry as an example and discusses how ‘Ata’ used the common metaphors of kingship as a garden in Islamic traditions and wrote how he eliminated the weeds and highlighted unique plants of this exclusive imperial garden in response to its critics among the early seventeenth-century ruling elite.
While ‘Ata’? presented his subjects as within the Ottoman imperial project and following its codes of decorum, he also revealed anxieties about position in this rank-conscious world. Chapter Three shows the ways in which ‘Ata’I’s dream stories turn the orderly imperial garden of the Hada’ik upside down. Dreamers in the Hadd’ik are discontented ulema who anxiously question where they stand and whether they can reach salvation. A close reading of selected dreams reveals how ‘Ata’I narrated his colleagues’ decisions to leave their careers at a time when concerned members of learned circles, including the ulema themselves, watched over what they perceived as corrupt and oppressive judges.
This chapter begins with a survey of the Ottoman dreamscape. It shows how Ottoman biographers were selective in the dreams they included in their works and how they were almost exclusively interested in dreams about career choices. Should one become a judge or should one leave one’s career for Sufism? Here we step into contested terrain because biographers had varied answers and narrated dreams to support their particular views. In this chapter, I delineate ‘Ata’I’s position in this debate and compare his narratives with those in other biographical works and dream diaries. I discuss how ‘Ata’I narrated dreams to criticize the hierarchical and career-conscious world of the seventeenth-century Ottoman learned circles, which he carefully presented through the arrangement, style and selection of his book.
The fourth and the last chapter turns to another debated issue of the period: the place of the dead in the world of the living in early seventeenth-century Istanbul. While the Salafi-minded preacher Kadizade (d. 1635) vehemently opposed those seeking assistance from the dead, Halveti sheikhs such as Sivasi (d. 1639) encouraged visits to graves by pointing to the help the dead offered. Biographers played important roles in these debates. They narrated stories of dreams and visions to advocate their views about the proper relationship between the living and the dead. This chapter examines how ‘Ata’1, the biographer who devoted himself to recording the lives of a thousand deceased men, situated himself among these debates.
In this first exploration of Ottoman apparitions and dreams of the dead, I focus on three deceased visitors in the Hadd@’ik stories: a sea captain who visited his friend at his house; a deceased beloved who appeared to his lover; and the Sufi sheikh Celaleddin Rimi (d. 1273), who greeted a Bayrami sheikh at his lodge. I find the ontological approach suggested by anthropologists working on ghost beliefs particularly helpful in understanding these meetings, and study the Ottoman deceased visitors as beings with desires, demands and biographies. After a brief discussion of seventeenth-century debates on the relationship between the dead and the living, I examine what the dead looked like, who appeared to whom, and why they arrived according to ‘Ata’l. Significantly, ‘Ata’1 did not narrate how the dead visited the living to deliver didactic messages or affirm their status, as often seen in earlier Islamic sources. Instead, he emphasized how death did not sever the ties of friendship and love.
In his stories, the deceased knock on doors, wait at gates, embrace upon meeting and present gifts to friends and beloveds. Their meetings show the significance of the relationship between the dead and the living for ‘Ata’I and the ways he wanted to emphasize the tangibility of their bonds of affection. Thus, by studying these relationships, this chapter also explores the little known history of friendship and love in the world of the seventeenth-century Ottomans.
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