Recent historical studies on the Ottoman Empire have taken for granted that subjects of the Ottoman polity flourished under a so-called “Pax Ottomanica.” This edited volume probes the rosy narrative of Ottoman tolerance that has long dominated the discussions. The articles carefully strive to contextualize the many issues that sound like ethnic slurs, racial stereotyping, religious discrimination, misogyny and elitism to modern ears. The goal of the volume is not to prove that Ottoman society was a persecuting one, or that dislike or distrust was its defining characteristic, but to investigate the axes of tension, blemishes, and fractures in the everyday practice of coexistence in a dynamic, multi-religious, multi-confessional and multi-ethnic empire in which difference was the norm rather than the exception.
Author(s): Hakan T. Karateke (ed.), H. Erdem Çıpa (ed.), Helga Anetshofer (ed.)
Series: Ottoman and Turkish Studies
Publisher: Academic Studies Press
Year: 2018
Language: English
Pages: 356
City: Brighton
Tags: Toleration--Turkey--History; Religious tolerance--Turkey--History; Discrimination--Turkey--History; Turkey--History--Ottoman Empire, 1288-1918
Acknowledgments vii
Author Bios viii
Introduction xi
Changing Perceptions about Christian-Born Ottomans: Anti-kul Sentiments in Ottoman Historiography 1
H. Erdem Çıpa
Circassian Mamluks in Ottoman Egypt and Istanbul, ca. 1500–1730: The Eastern Alternative 22
Jane Hathaway
Dispelling the Darkness of the Halberdier’s Treatise: A Comparative Look at Black Africans in Ottoman Letters in the Early Modern Period 43
Baki Tezcan
The Jew, the Orthodox Christian, and the European in Ottoman Eyes, ca. 1550–1700 75
Bilha Moor
An Ottoman Anti-Judaism 107
Hakan T. Karateke
Evliyā Çelebī’s Perception of Jews 128
Hakan T. Karateke
Ambiguous Subjects and Uneasy Neighbors: Bosnian Franciscans’ Attitudes toward the Ottoman State, “Turks,” and Vlachs 148
Vjeran Kursar
“Those Violating the Good, Old Customs of our Land”: Forms and Functions of Graecophobia in the Danubian Principalities, 16th–18th Centuries 187
Konrad Petrovszky
The Many Faces of the “Gypsy” in Early Modern Ottoman Discourse 215
Faika Çelik
Gendered Infidels in Fiction: A Case Study on Sābit’s Ḥikāye-i Ḫvāce Fesād 244
İpek Hüner-Cora
“The Greatest of Tribulations”: Constructions of Femininity in Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Physiognomy 264
Emin Lelić
Defining and Defaming the Other in Early Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Invective 296
Michael D. Sheridan
“Are You From Çorum?”: Derogatory Attitudes Toward the “Unruly Mob” of the Provinces as Reflected in a Proverbial Saying 321
Helga Anetshofer
Index 334
