Introduction Excerpt for The Order and Disorder of Communication

INTRODUCTION

Aḥmad gripped the cup tightly, nervously waiting to enter the study. He had been a disciple of ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (1641–1731) for some years now and knew that his master enjoyed a cup of coffee while writing. Nābulusī was in one of his states now, frantically scribbling out a draft of yet another book, just one of the hundreds he had written since 1672 that had turned him into a near-celebrity throughout the Ottoman Empire. Nābulusī himself had hardly set a foot out of his house in Damascus, though. His writings had traveled in his stead. The sultan was said to have read his works while sitting in his palace in Istanbul, but so did humble carpenters in the Palestinian countryside.¹ Just the other day, a man from the town of Samokov, not far from Sofia, had written to the master, peppering him with questions and pledging to spread his works.²

Yet, a nagging doubt kept troubling Aḥmad. How was it that his master could write so much and distribute hundreds of copies of his work throughout the empire while still finding the time to teach, keep up with correspondence, meet with the common people, and even fit in a daily stroll through the gardens with the brothers? That doubt had driven Aḥmad to discover his master’s secret, so he entered the study while Nābulusī was in one of his writing states. But Nābulusī was simply sitting there, pen in hand. Without looking up from the page, Nābulusī told his disciple to fetch him another cup from the coffee seller. Now Aḥmad found himself at the door of the study, a cup of coffee in hand, still unsure of how to solve the mystery. When he opened the door this time, however, he found forty Nābulusīs, forty exact copies of his master, “sitting crowded together, jam-packed, each of them writing in the form and manner of the master, their reed pens screeching.” Aḥmad rushed to bring forty more cups of coffee. When he later returned to collect the cups, his master turned to him and said, “Aḥmad, abandon your doubts.”³

The story above is one of the many miraculous deeds Nābulusī and his followers told about his persona. It was meant both to confirm that he truly had authored every one of his hundreds of books and to legitimize him as a writer. Ceaselessly propagating one’s works to sway public opinion was not considered a particularly respectable pursuit. Nābulusī cast himself instead as a saint whose writings were produced and disseminated across the empire thanks to divine favor rather than by any effort of his own to gain worldly fame or influence.

More astounding to the modern observer might be that all of Nābulusī’s writings were copied by hand. As they made their way from Damascus to Sarajevo, Baghdad, and every town in between, every copy of every pamphlet was painstakingly written by hand. In fact, nearly all written communication—each book, pamphlet, treatise, letter, and note—was made this way. Manuscript technology, the simple act of copying a text with pen and paper, a technology of textual reproduction so basic we barely consider it a technology today, continued to reign supreme in the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic world at large until the late nineteenth century and even into the twentieth. In contrast, by the late sixteenth century, much of Western Europe and East Asia employed printing as the predominant method of reproducing books, whether through moveable metal type or woodblock. In these places, information intended for a more limited audience—private letters, government ledgers, early newsletters, alchemical texts, salacious poems—continued to be copied by hand, but printing became the principal method of reproducing books for public consumption. The case of the Ottoman Empire reminds us that a large portion of the early modern world was familiar with print but chose instead to circulate writings almost entirely through the medium of manuscripts. That is why part of Nābulusī’s wonderous feat was to make forty copies of himself, each replicating the same text, in the same handwriting, as trustworthy as the author’s rough draft.

Nābulusī did author hundreds of books, at least 280 by one count.⁴ A few—the ones scholars often study today—were lengthy tomes about mysticism, metaphysics, and law, but the vast majority were pamphlets. It is not unlikely that his empire-wide fame as an author was due to his incessant pamphleteering.⁵ Pamphlets, as I call them, were cheap, short, and highly mobile texts—all copied by hand—devoted to a set of bitter polemical debates that wracked the Ottoman Empire over the course of the seventeenth century. The disputes did not concern support for palace factions or the political direction of the empire but the daily deeds that defined a good Muslim. Was it permissible to smoke tobacco? Could a Muslim declare that she belonged to the “religion of Abraham”—as the Qur’an instructed the first Muslims to say—or was it an act of disrespect against the Prophet Muhammad? Could one pray at the graves of saints? Nābulusī’s most popular pamphlet was devoted to a slightly nauseating but very popular medical procedure called hummus or chickpea cauterization (kayy al-ḥimmaṣa). A patient would have a cautery applied to a point on his body, and then a chickpea would be placed in the wound so that it would suppurate and draw the pain-producing, harmful matter from the body. The controversy regarded not the procedure itself but whether the resulting fluids invalidated a Muslim’s ritual purity and, therefore, his prayers. In short, these debates did not involve abstruse theological questions or gnostic ruminations but relatively simple legal discussions about the permissibility of the everyday practices that constructed Islam as a lived religion.⁶

I argue in this book that the polemics of the seventeenth century were driven by a shift in the ways and means by which Ottoman subjects communicated. Modern historians, in contrast, have considered them to be the product of a short-lived and ultimately inconsequential paroxysm of religious fundamentalism. The basic outline of that argument is that a group of charismatic preachers during the seventeenth century beguiled the urban masses of Istanbul to reject all innovations like smoking and saint worship and embrace a conservative, austere Islam.⁷ I point to a different cause—the pamphlet. The pamphlet was both the forum for the polemics and an agent in their creation. Pamphlets exacerbated the polemics by creating polarized publics of readers, setting off a flurry of falsely authored texts, allowing the semieducated to participate in public debates, and propelling new models of authorship, like the one that Nābulusī fashioned for himself.

Pamphlets in and of themselves did not cause the polemics of the period. The ecosystem of communication that had taken root in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire—the manner of education, methods of reading and arguing, and the production and circulation of books—allowed pamphlets to flourish and fuel new social tensions. I refer to this concatenation of practices and technologies as the empire’s communication order.⁸ While communication is admittedly a fuzzy word, we might think of a communication order as the sum total of the political and cultural institutions used to navigate, regulate, and encourage the circulation of information.⁹ In the most basic sense, it entails the production and reproduction of texts, the means of education, and methods of reading, writing, listening, speaking, and seeing. It extends further, though, to broader discussions of censorship, language ideologies, publics, archives, gossip, news, and more. Within this wider communication order, I focus on the role of books in particular. Books and book history might be archetypical topics for the early modern historian, but their part in an Ottoman politics of communication has been neglected, as discussed below. The emphasis on written texts does not mean that the oral or the interpersonal are necessarily absent, however. The written and the oral were constantly intertwined, and texts still circulated among semieducated or illiterate subjects even if they read, argued, and wrote in substantially different ways than their better-educated contemporaries.¹⁰

The notion of order also has a double meaning. Order, of course, carries with it the sense of a system of interacting parts. In this regard, the book’s first half sketches out an entire ecology of books in the Ottoman Empire, examining how books were produced, the movement of texts regulated, education administered, reading conducted, and publics cultivated. Making order is a normative process, too, though. Learned elites were unequivocal in their disdain for the people they thought communicated incorrectly and the places where they gathered: pamphleteers who wrote to sway public opinion, poets babbling in coffeehouses, preachers haranguing in mosques, and anyone who dared to read just for the base pleasure of an enticing narrative or to even discuss a text without mastering the linguistic sciences that undergirded a proper education. They not only attempted to canonize certain forms of reading and censored authors they considered had stepped out of place, but they also regarded poor communication as the very cause of the disputes and disarray of the times. The second half of the book is devoted to this other side of the coin, the dynamics of the ostensible disorder, that is, the polemics, polarization, and accusations of fake authorship fueled by the emergence of pamphlets.

Manuscripts and Modernity

Behind this book’s more focused argument about the connection between the polemics and pamphlets in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire lies a grander ambition to reimagine the kinds of histories that can be written about communication in the early modern Middle East. In the simplest terms, this entails introducing questions derived from the now substantial field of the history of the book and communication to the study of the Ottoman Empire. The field of “book history” first arose as a corrective to grand statements about the transformative power of print in Europe, with historians rightfully insisting that we look instead at how printed books were made, circulated, and used in practice.¹¹ In doing so, they have brought together the material, economic, and social processes of communication into a unified field of inquiry. Their findings have been predominantly rooted in the early modern European experience of print, however, and in this book I borrow their approach and questions to explore the communication order of the early modern Middle East, where print was only minimally present.

Scholars of premodern Middle Eastern history, however, have only begun to delve into questions derived from the history of the book.¹² This is not to say that these topics have been absent. Especially for the medieval era, there is a robust literature on the “transmission of knowledge” that touches upon the role of educational institutions, the relationship between orality and writing, networks of scholars, and libraries and scribes.¹³ Studies are sparser for the Ottoman period, at least in English. Still, we now have an idea of the empire’s book trade and libraries, thanks to Ismail Erünsal’s pioneering work, not to mention essential studies on specific genres of texts like catechisms and popular tales and the role of book collectors and libraries.¹⁴ In the same vein, art historians have delved into the material life of luxurious or illustrated manuscripts (which represent only a tiny fraction of the books produced), and codicologists are now detailing libraries of more ordinary books.¹⁵ Finally, historians are reexamining the adoption of print in the nineteenth-century Middle East and investigating if it indeed marked a revolutionary break from manuscript culture.¹⁶ These studies are all invaluable, and my hope with this book is to tie together the findings of these local studies with the insights of historians of the book and communication to present a glimpse of an entire ecosystem of communication and its political world rather than a study of a single text or library.

There is a deeper reason, however, why historians of the early modern Middle East have rarely ventured into the politics of communication and attempted to bring the insights of book history to the field. The fact is that the persistence of manuscript technology in the Islamic world until the nineteenth century has profoundly colored the way that historians have written about the topic. Historians have long favored narratives of technological revolution—points at which the very nature of communication seemingly shifted overnight—like the invention of the telegraph and the internet—and the advent of the printing press in Europe is the foundational event for this paradigm. By producing more copies more quickly and with less labor, print made texts more widely available, expanded literacy, stabilized content, and thus birthed modernity via the Renaissance and the Reformation, or so the story goes.¹⁷ Manuscript technology, in turn, became regarded as the negative image of print: a static, medieval holdover that made books prohibitively expensive to produce, limited literacy, and restrained the circulation of information. Within this paradigm, the Ottoman refusal of print became a rejection of modernity itself.¹⁸

Print’s long shadow has caused historians to overlook the role of books in shaping the politics of the early modern Ottoman Empire. While they certainly recognize that many books were written and read in the empire, they have limited the scope of their analysis to books within elite and learned circles or focused more on interpersonal interactions: debates in salons, networks of long-distance correspondence, or official edicts of the state.¹⁹ They largely discount, however, the possibility that books circulated openly among strangers and across multiple levels of premodern Middle Eastern society and in doing so fashioned new concepts of authorship, initiated censorship regimes, sparked polemics, exacerbated polarization, and forged novel publics. These are phenomena that supposedly can only occur in societies that have mass media, in which texts are reproduced mechanically. In particular, the prospect for publics is disregarded. Publics, as Michael Warner reminds us, are not mere audiences but social entities created through the reflexive circulation of texts between strangers. Publics turn isolated and individual acts of reading, mere moments of attention paid to a text, into a unified political field; some publics even come to be equated with the public.²⁰ Yet, historians only speak about publics and public politics in the Ottoman Empire after the widespread adoption of print in the second half of the nineteenth century.²¹ A good portion of this book’s larger ambition is simply to show in general that a vibrant, contentious politics of communication, anchored in manuscript technology, could and did exist in the early modern Ottoman Empire and that pamphlets turned the field of law in particular into a space of public politics.

This is not to say that technology does not impact the very manner in which we communicate. It certainly does, but perhaps not in the way we might think. We tend to believe that new communication technologies transform society by radically increasing the scale of production: more texts, more readers, more authors, and more information circulating further at greater speed and with more reliability. At a certain point—invariably pinned to the invention of typographic printing in Europe—these changes exceed some ephemeral boundary, and communication changes its very nature and becomes “modern,” usually identified as the birth of mass media or the public sphere.²² Even recent works that have rehabilitated the manuscript in the early modern Middle East have inadvertently repeated this narrative of revolution, trying to ascertain the magical moment when the number of readers or books crossed the threshold of modernity.²³ Yet, any search for that specific moment or technology that marks modernity is ultimately futile, as Daniel Lord Smail and Andrew Shryock remind us.²⁴ Not only do we ignore histories of communication that proceeded along paths of sustained creativity and lingering inertia, like those of the Middle East, but we forget that the line between the modern and the premodern is illusory. Just as the design of a fractal remains the same as the scale shifts, the fundamental dynamics of communication remain the same even as the number of texts or readers grows.

A new technology’s more significant changes, I would argue, are not (just) shifts in scale but reworkings of the economics of communication and the creation of new material chokepoints and bottlenecks. For example, few academic historians today still subscribe to twentieth-century narratives of print’s impact as revolutionary. Instead, they now regard it to have had a much more gradual and evolutionary development. The printing press did not lead to an explosion of new readers, nor did it bring about textual verity and stability.²⁵ The only thing that can be decisively attributed to the printing press is its sheer ability to produce millions of books. In early modern Europe, this increase did represent a scalar shift in production, but its impact resided primarily in the commercialization of book production—the printed book being arguably the first mass-produced object—and in the organization of information, not in the birth of modern communication practices.²⁶ For the twenty-first century, it can be likewise argued that social media is novel not because it reaches more people more quickly or is more susceptible to false information and fake authorship than other forms of media but because it relies on decentralized forms of content creation, algorithms of distribution, and an economy of harvesting user information. These in turn have transformed communication into a competitive game, often making it feel new.²⁷ As for the early modern Ottoman Empire, although fewer books were produced there than in societies with print, the same general dynamics of reading, fake authorship, and regulation were at play. Manuscript technology’s main impact on Ottoman society was not to constrain the number of readers or books but to create a radically decentralized and noncommercialized system of written communication. The manuscript, in other words, was simply a technology, a method for reproducing text with its own advantages and disadvantages, neither modern nor unmodern.

Modernity, of course, is also a moving target. In 2003, the authors of the United Nations’ Arab Human Development Report argued that the Middle East needed to become a “knowledge society.” Only continued efforts to increase literacy (which in Egypt, for example, rose to current levels of around 70% only in the 1990s), expand access to the internet, and print more newspapers and books would promote democracy, reduce censorship, and modernize the region.²⁸ This late twentieth-century vision of ideal communication—in which open access to an ever-increasing array of accurate information would usher in rationality, peace, and democracy—seems very distant now. The view from the early twenty-first century is markedly more dystopian. The overwhelming flow of information has brought in its wake systemic problems of misinformation, constant surveillance, lack of trust, and societal polarization. In response, social scientists and historians have begun to reconsider those normative values that previously defined good communication in the twentieth century. In particular, the ideal that information should circulate unrestricted and be freely available is no longer sacrosanct.²⁹ More information, more books, and more media are no longer equated with modernity, at least not positively. Instead, there is a growing fear that corporations, governments, and malicious individuals flood the public sphere with information to mislead and corrupt democratic processes.³⁰ This shift has led to a reevaluation of the inherent value of free speech, and censorship is no longer considered an abhorrent practice but an inevitable means of regulating the circulation of information.³¹

This shift in the normative values of communication in the present allows historians to write more openly and freely about communication practices in the past. The Ottoman Empire no longer needs to be judged against the standards of an idealized modernity from the twentieth century. The sketch of the empire’s communication order that I draw—with its decentralized method of book production, ways of coping with misinformation and fake authors, and deep polarization—may seem less exotic and more familiar to readers today in the twenty-first century. The study of the premodern Ottoman Empire is thus not just a matter of antiquarian curiosity but also a space to reflect rigorously on the changes our own societies are undergoing. This approach might strike some as presentist, but all history is inevitably grounded in the concerns and analyses of the present, and historians are more openly embracing such approaches once again.³²

For this reason, this monograph, despite its emphasis on books and pamphlets, is more than just a history of the book in its material form. Only the first chapter and a part of the second—on questions of production and circulation—are dedicated to the material life of Ottoman books. The bulk of the work focuses more broadly on how social practices of communication ordered and disrupted the empire’s political and intellectual landscape. In this sense, it echoes earlier works that highlighted the intersection of politics and practices of communication. Writing in the 1980s, Roger Chartier, for example, connected reading techniques to the French Revolution, and Benedict Anderson argued that the imagined community of the nation emerged from printed vernacular texts of the eighteenth century.³³ Historians have never forgotten this political side of books and communication, but their analysis has sometimes become too granular in recent years.³⁴ The well-deserved emphasis on books’ materiality has become overly fetishized, and studies have often focused too narrowly on the microhistories of individual readers. Of course, the “politics” bit of the politics of communication looks quite different today than it did when Chartier and Anderson were writing. Whereas they searched for the public sphere, reading revolutions, or the origins of the nation, historians today now probe the dynamics of societal polarization and misinformation.

The Manuscript Record

The flourishing manuscript culture of the early modern Ottoman Empire left behind millions of manuscript volumes, and today they are kept in institutional collections and private libraries throughout the empire’s former lands as well as in Western Europe and North America. This bounty is likely just a tiny portion of the material that was in circulation, however. Most books were cheap and ephemeral, like the pamphlets, romances, or catechisms that were rarely preserved and never found their way into libraries. Even so, the millions of manuscripts that do remain form an unparalleled and largely untapped archive, a resource that is, for the most part, unavailable to scholars of the medieval past.

This early modern manuscript archive deserves a deeper and more substantial look by historians. Most researchers understandably treat it primarily as a repository of unpublished texts. After all, the vast majority of works from the Ottoman period are still only available as manuscripts, and printed editions are often shoddy and unreliable. Yet, we can also consider the entirety of Ottoman-era Islamic manuscripts as a cohesive archive of sorts, one that can be read much like an archaeological or geological record. In a such framework, single manuscript volumes are similar to individual artifacts, each with a story to tell if one can correctly interpret the signs. By looking into their material characteristics—their colophons, marginalia, bindings, reading statements, ownership records, scripts, even the way they have been grouped with other texts—we can start finding clues as to their reception and circulation. Patterns become more evident when tens or even hundreds of copies of the same text are examined side by side.³⁵ While this book is not devoted to codicology, I use these techniques throughout it to demonstrate acts of censorship, establish readership, and look at how far a text might have traveled.

Stepping back from the individual volume, we can also look at collections of books as a whole—either through the holdings of extant libraries or historical book lists—much like larger deposits of artifacts.³⁶ The presence or absence of specific books or genres is instructive, and each collection has its own history and character, the product not only of the preferences of earlier collectors but also of the particular flows of books, readers, and writers that fell into its catchment. The differing handwriting of manuscripts in the National Library of Tunisia reveals whether the audience for a book was comprised of local scholars or visitors from the imperial center. Some seventeenth-century libraries in Istanbul were the equivalent of rare book libraries, whereas others were intended for more quotidian use. Comparing the catalogs of Istanbul libraries between 1500 and 1800 reveals the changing intellectual priorities of the learned elites. Historical events—like the sacking of Buda and Sarajevo by the Habsburgs—left their mark in the manuscript record by turning certain collections—like the Marsili collection in Bologna—into historical time capsules, and modern-day historians can read them for clues about the circulation of books as a whole.³⁷

The slight irony is that these techniques do not readily apply to Ottoman pamphlets. Pamphlets were too cheap and minor to warrant colophons, ownership statements, and other readership marks, so direct documentary evidence regarding their production and reception is sparse. They were also too ephemeral to be collected and preserved in early modern collections, so they are underrepresented in libraries today. Yet, the above techniques can still be used to adumbrate the communication order of the Ottoman Empire as a whole.

More importantly, this particular methodology allows scholars to move beyond treating texts only as either repositories of historical facts or collections of narratives and representations and to see them instead as material objects that can be used to track reception and intellectual history.³⁸ I honed this method over years of research examining thousands of manuscripts in many, many different libraries throughout the former Ottoman Empire. Most of the work was conducted in Turkey, in particular at that giant repository of manuscripts, the Süleymaniye Library (which also includes the holdings of the Nuruosmaniye and Köprülü Libraries), but also at the various other manuscript libraries of the city like the İbrahim Hakkı Konyalı Library, the Topkapı Palace Museum, the Sadberk Hanım Museum, and many others. The research was supplemented by trips to other libraries across Turkey—in particular, Ankara, Konya, Bursa, and Manisa—and I spent months working in different collections in Cairo, Sofia, Sarajevo, Jerusalem, Tunis, Berlin, Bologna, Paris, Vienna, Cambridge (in both Massachusetts and England), Washington, D.C., Princeton, Los Angeles, and many other cities.³⁹

Thriving and Fighting in the Seventeenth Century

By the seventeenth century, the Ottomans had established themselves as one of the premier empires of the early modern world. From its capital in Constantinople, the empire stretched through the Balkans and past Budapest in the north to the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea in the south. It had vassal states across North Africa and the Ukrainian steppe. Many of its cities had become centers of learning that could rival any competitor, past or present. Given the immensity of its power and scope, it is easy to forget that the Ottoman Empire began as a trifling tribal emirate squeezed against the Byzantines in the furthest corner of northwestern Anatolia around the year 1300. As the Ottomans initially expanded into the Balkans and Western Anatolia over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, they encountered (and contributed to) a largely deurbanized landscape. Centuries of instability and warfare had nearly completely depopulated Byzantine cities.⁴⁰ Even Constantinople, on the eve of the Ottoman conquest in 1453, resembled a provincial center of 30,000–40,000 inhabitants more than the thousand-year capital of the Roman Empire. Only in the seventeenth century would the capital’s population reach its height of perhaps 400,000–500,000 souls and become one of the biggest cities in the world.⁴¹

One consequence of these frontier origins is that the book world of the Ottoman Empire began from next to nothing. It was not simply an extension of the thriving literary culture of the medieval Islamic heartlands. Scholars and books were rarely found on the frontier, much less a madrasa, mosque, or library. Not only did institutions of learning have to be built, but urban life itself—often a key component for a thriving culture of books—had to take root.⁴²

The revival and fluorescence of urban life, especially in Anatolia and the Balkans, was one of the lasting legacies of the Ottomans. This was partly thanks to the empire’s continued stability throughout the sixteenth century and its targeted policies to resuscitate urban institutions. Moreover, the empire came to include the major cities of Aleppo, Damascus, Medina, and Cairo—and their vibrant scholarly communities—after it swallowed the Mamluk kingdom in 1517. In the seventeenth century, western Anatolian cities continued to be fed by influxes of refugees fleeing from rural banditry and rebellion in central Anatolia and continuous wars on the eastern and western frontiers. Cities in turn were important as stages where piety and persecution, reading and rebellion were acted out for all to see. Coffeehouses, mosques, and streets became the renewed sites of public gatherings.⁴³

Equally importantly, cities were the location of the continuously expanding educational infrastructure of the empire, a topic detailed in the third chapter. Madrasas or universities were established by the hundreds, along with thousands of elementary schools, both official and unofficial, public lectures were offered in mosques, and Sufi lodges trained disciples. In the seventeenth century, the offices of bureaucrats too became major centers of education. Together these institutions of education staffed the Ottomans’ increasingly complex and immense religious and bureaucratic apparatus. Although the empire expanded geographically most quickly in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it was only in the seventeenth century that its human infrastructure grew to match it. Each of these institutions introduced a large swath of the population to various texts, but they also taught students to read in different ways, thus creating multiple intellectual formations in Ottoman society.

Cities were also sites for the accumulation of capital, especially among merchants and financiers.⁴⁴ Although the economic well-being of the empire’s population has not been thoroughly investigated, the wealth of the Ottoman populace as a whole grew over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as Hülya Canbakal and Alpay Filiztekin have shown.⁴⁵ This expansion in wealth might come as a surprise given that the predominant narrative for the period is one of economic crisis. The Ottoman state had to confront rising prices, a growing demand for specie, and inevitable currency devaluations, which brought about massive inflation between 1590 and 1630.⁴⁶ Urban consumers must have felt squeezed, and Janissary soldiers, paid a set salary, found recourse by merging with the artisan classes.⁴⁷ Yet, commercial activity also expanded in the swelling cities, and the wealth it generated was stored in valuable goods that could be liquidated, like expansive libraries of expensive books. These new sources of wealth and power allowed Ottoman subjects to carve out their own niches and transgress certain social or intellectual expectations. As we shall see, learned elites constantly complained about the middling peoples—merchants, artisans, palace employees, and even villagers—sticking their heads into debates and discussions where they were not welcome. Even for the educated, though, mercantile fortunes allowed them to forge new roles outside the traditional clerical or bureaucratic tracks. It is perhaps not a coincidence that many of the protagonists of this book—such as Nābulusī, Kātib Çelebi (d. 1657), and Ebūaḥmedzāde (d. c. 1676)—were able to use their inherited mercantile wealth to invent new identities for themselves.

The growth of new economic classes was mirrored by the political expansion of the Ottoman state. As many historians have shown, the empire only managed to survive the challenges it faced in the seventeenth century by distributing power to a much broader range of its subjects. This more expansive vision of the state was a marked break from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries when the Ottomans relied on a new, relatively small cadre of elites to transition from a frontier state to a more centralized empire. They comprised one or two thousand administrators and soldiers, many recruited as slaves from the empire’s Christian population and trained in the palace. Except for a small group of magistrates educated in the madrasa, free-born Muslims had limited prospects for entering the halls of power.⁴⁸ By the seventeenth century, however, the state was forced to incorporate many more of the empire’s free-born Muslim subjects who quickly joined the military, scribal, and clerical corps by the hundreds of thousands.

The expansion of the state transformed the very nature of Ottoman politics. New palace factions of queen mothers, eunuchs, chief jurists, grand viziers, and other functionaries took part in the political process, but also humbler, smaller people did too.⁴⁹ Preachers, artisans, merchants, scribes, and soldiers also insisted, more discreetly, on having a place at the table.⁵⁰ Perhaps even the people did too.⁵¹ Politics was rowdier as well, to say the least. Although small urban rebellions by the sipāhīs (the prebendal cavalry) had already begun in 1589, the year 1622 was a watershed as it was the first time a sultan, ʿOs̱mān II (r. 1618–1622), was overthrown (and executed) by his subjects. The ensuing decades were marked by chronic political turbulence as bloody urban revolts led by the Janissaries became a regular fact of life in Istanbul. Sultan Ibrāhīm I (r. 1640–1648) was deposed in 1648, the Plane Tree Incident shook the capital in 1656, and Meḥmed IV (r. 1648–1687) was overthrown in 1687. The rule of şeyḫülislām Feyżullah (d. 1703) and his sultan Muṣṭafā II (r. 1695–1703) perhaps represented a high-water mark of political instability and religious strife. Military defeats heightened social and political tensions. The Ottomans had already lost Hungary to the Habsburgs in 1686, but the army was disastrously routed again at the Battle of Zenta in 1697, and the Treaty of Karlowicz in 1699 formalized the empire’s first significant territorial loss. By 1703, the empire exploded again when the people of Istanbul rebelled and ruled the city themselves for over a year, Muṣṭafā II was overthrown, and a mob brutally killed Feyżullah.⁵² 1703 was a turning point of sorts, and the ensuing reign of Aḥmed III (r. 1703–1730) initiated an era of relative peace and stability. Yet, Aḥmed III, too, was unexpectedly overthrown in 1730 by a revolt instigated by an Albanian bathhouse attendant and Janissary named Patrona Ḫalīl (d. 1730). This last revolt was perhaps a final hiccup of major political instability in the capital before an extended period of relative stability and prosperity that lasted until the early nineteenth century.

As the Ottoman body politic expanded to include many more Muslims, questions about who was a Muslim and how to define Islam took on increased importance. The Ottomans had long championed Islam, but there had always been multiple visions of Islam at play. On the frontier where the Ottoman Empire first emerged, far away from the cities, nomadic warriors and antinomian holy men wandered the countryside, and hospices and Sufi lodges were the predominant religious buildings.⁵³ The confessional identity of the empire’s subjects was of relatively minor concern to its rulers; in the words of Cemal Kafadar, there reigned a “metadoxy,” a form of confessional ambiguity in which neither orthodoxy nor heterodoxy was ever fully articulated.⁵⁴ This state of affairs began to change in the late fifteenth century as institutions of learning and legal scholarship began proliferating in the growing cities. The process was greatly accelerated in the early sixteenth century when Shah Ismāʿīl, the founder of the Safavid dynasty, and his supporters, the Ḳızılbaş, challenged the Ottomans on the empire’s territory. The rebellion was cast as a religious struggle against heresy, and the Ottomans adopted a specifically Sunni confessional identity for the empire. Although this process of confessional disciplining initially targeted Muslims on the Iranian frontier, it slowly spread into cities in the heart of the empire.⁵⁵ Both the government and ordinary Muslims began a process of introspection, monitoring, and debate to ensure that lived practices fit into prescribed religious ideals, especially as defined by the Law, that is, the sharia.⁵⁶ In response, other forms of Islam—remnants of the frontier religiosity, Sufism itself, Illuminationist philosophy, etc.—began to evolve and take on new roles either in support or opposition to the new emphasis on legalistic Islam.⁵⁷

Polemics between Legalists and Sufis

In light of these changes, it is not surprising that heated debates began to erupt over common everyday actions. As mentioned earlier, acts like smoking tobacco, renewal-of-faith prayers, and more became controversial. Writing in 1656, the bibliophile clerk Kātib Çelebi detailed twenty-one of these debates in his famous book, The Balance of Truth (Mīzānu’l-ḥaḳḳ).⁵⁸ By 1696, the judge of the city of Chania in Crete read Kātib Çelebi’s text with his students, and they quickly came up with forty more topics to add to the list.⁵⁹ By the middle of the seventeenth century, positions on these debates had consolidated into a binary set of political stances. An Ottoman subject who believed that tobacco smoking should be permissible would almost certainly support Muslims who wished to perform dance-like ẕikr rituals or declare that they belonged to the religion of Abraham. Like the culture wars of the United States in the early twenty-first century, an opinion on any one issue reliably predicted one’s views on many other matters.

Modern historians have largely cast these polemics as a short-lived and ultimately inconsequential paroxysm of religious fundamentalism.⁶⁰ They are often referred to in shorthand as the Ḳāḍīzādeli debates, a reference to the charismatic preacher Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed (d. 1635) and his followers who rallied against practices like smoking or saint worship that they decreed to be heretical deviations (bidʿa) from the sharia.⁶¹ The Ḳāḍīzādeli narrative put forth by modern historians, however, too often repeats uncritically the words and views of Ottoman chroniclers and observers writing in the seventeenth century, like Naʿīmā Muṣṭafā (d. 1716) or the aforementioned Kātib Çelebi, who dismissed the polemics as the misguided quarrels of poorly educated commoners. Echoing their sources, historians today, too, have diminished the severity and significance of these debates.

Yet, for many, though by no means all, Ottoman subjects, these debates were vitally important. The question of how to define a proper Muslim was not some abstract theological concern but a divisive dispute about who belonged to the body politic of the empire itself. Through a hundred fights over everyday practices and actions, the debates constructed competing visions of the nature of Islam itself. Was Islam to be defined primarily or even solely through the Law, that is, the sharia, or through a variety of other competing moral systems such as Sufism or philosophy?⁶² These fights polarized large parts of Ottoman society to such an extent that two competing sides emerged by the second half of the seventeenth century—the Legalists and the Sufis.

The Legalists (a term I use to avoid the implicit pejorative meaning of the word Ḳāḍīzādelis) were a broad and disparate group who insisted that only the Law could provide a suitable moral framework for being Muslim. Their side consisted of both learned scholars educated in the madrasa but also of a more middling population—comprised of the likes of artisans, merchants, palace employees, endowment administrators, imams, and even villagers—who possessed some education but never reached the heights that professors or bureaucrats attained. Yet, they still insisted on making and partaking in debates over what a Muslim should and should not do and perhaps found a means of social distinction in them.⁶³ “Commoner jurists” is what Nābulusī once called them derisively. On the other side were the Sufis, or anti-Legalists, who were a looser coalition united by their steadfast commitment to the diversity of Islam and their opposition to Legalist machinations (though they were never opposed to the Law).⁶⁴ They were comprised of Sufis, of course, from the Turcophone central lands of the empire, but also learned scholars from the Arab provinces, philosophy-obsessed bureaucrats, as well as a large share of middling and semieducated followers interested in honoring the established customs of their forefathers (salaf).

A word of caution and clarification is necessary here about the categorization of the two camps, the Legalists and Sufis. Some might be hesitant to use these terms because they suggest that the Law and Sufism are oppositional in Islam, a point of view all too common among Muslims today. Historians often point out that in many periods and places, like Mamluk Egypt and the Ottoman Empire too, Sufis could easily be advocates for increased adherence to the Law.⁶⁵ It was no contradiction for a judge—a man who tirelessly applied the sharia to the minutiae of daily life—to be a Sufi. Legalist leaders like Vānī Meḥmed (d. 1685) were affiliated with some Sufi orders, and, likewise, very few Sufis ever advocated an antinomian position of purposefully contradicting the Law. Most prominently, Nābulusī, as mentioned earlier, was a champion for the Sufis, railing constantly in his pamphlets against the Legalists, both popular and learned, but still was a deeply trained jurist (and former judge) who upheld the sharia to counter government oppression. As Samuela Pagani elegantly states, “Nābulusī takes on the mission to explain and publicize the freedoms that the Law provides.”⁶⁶

Despite the above concerns, I think the terms Legalist and Sufi best capture essential aspects of the religious dynamics of the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire. First and foremost, the historical actors themselves frequently referred to a deep and polarizing divide between Sufis and their critics as a distinct social reality at the end of the seventeenth century, each calling for the violent suppression of the other. This was not a timeless distinction but one that developed within that particular historical moment. While Sufis called themselves Sufis (as did their enemies), the problem is defining the other side. To the degree that Legalists wrote about themselves, they only called themselves Muslims or Sunnis, which is far too general. Their critics, on the other hand, only referred to them pejoratively as “fanatics” and “extremists” or, most commonly, “condemners” (munkirīn). The term “Ḳāḍīzādelis,” the word preferred by scholars today, was also an insult, meant to define them, incorrectly, as fanatical and unthinking followers of Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed. Other historians opt for descriptors from outside Ottoman history. Yet, each of these options has its problems: calling Legalists “orthodox” Muslims reifies the idea that the Law is the only and proper vision of Islam.⁶⁷ The terms “fundamentalist,” “puritanical,” or “Salafi” (a Muslim who wishes to return to an imagined pure Islam from the time of the Prophet Muhammad) not only borrow from Christian conceptions of religious revival but also incorrectly project on the Legalists a program of adhering to or inventing tradition as a reaction to modernity. It might be best to resolve the problem by defining this group positively according to their actual professed beliefs. The program that unified them was moral purification, both of their selves and the world, and they argued that it could only be achieved through the framework of the Law.⁶⁸ In other words, they did not just consider the Law to be necessary but the sole means through which to be a moral human being and a good Muslim. The word that most succinctly expresses this mission is the term Legalist.

The Power and Novelty of Pamphlets

This book examines the social and intellectual world from which pamphlets arose, in particular, the polemical debates for which pamphlets were both a forum and factor. But what were pamphlets precisely? Pamphlets were relatively short and quickly copied tracts, usually between two to twenty folios long, that moved readily through Ottoman society during the seventeenth century. They were just one of the many forms of ephemeral and short texts that circulated in the Ottoman Empire, alongside prayer books, catechisms, and entertaining tales. Unlike these other forms of cheap manuscripts, pamphlets were devoted to debating the permissibility, or impermissibility, of daily socioreligious practices. An author would briefly introduce the topic, state his position, and then provide various pieces of evidence—usually the relevant views of varied legal authorities and hadiths (traditions about the words and actions of the Prophet Muhammad)—and then field possible objections.

Were pamphlets new? Well, yes and no. Technologically, pamphlets were not new. The basic process of making and copying books in the Ottoman Empire had not changed much since the widespread adoption of paper in late eighth-century Baghdad. Paper—as opposed to papyrus or parchment—met the burgeoning needs of the literati and bureaucrats of the Abbasid Empire and allowed for the rise of a book culture that spread to cities across the Islamic world, where it continued for centuries. It is a history of continuous fluorescence and occasional inertia rather than one punctuated by technological revolutions.

In terms of genre, the pamphlet was also not necessarily new. In Arabic or Turkish, a pamphlet was almost always called a risāla in the singular and rasāʾil in the plural (risāle and resāʾil in Turkish, respectively). The word risāla, however, just means epistle and could apply to a treatise of nearly any length on any topic. It was part of the terminology of books initially developed in eighth- and ninth-century Baghdad.⁶⁹ Further along in time, the risāla even emerged as a legal genre of sorts in the late Mamluk kingdom, where scholars like Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī (d. 1505) and Ibn Ṭūlūn (d. 1548) wrote masses of short risālas directed toward specific legal questions.

In this book, I choose to use the word “pamphlet,” rather than risāla, to speak about the small and short texts used for polemical debates. First, the choice is simple disambiguation. The emic term of risāla is simply too broad. It makes no more sense to analyze risālas as a category than to look at all kitābs or “books.” I therefore borrow the term “pamphlet” from the context of early modern European print to differentiate the short and polemical tracts of the seventeenth century from treatises or books in general.⁷⁰ The pamphlet represents a new and different entity in Ottoman society not because its technological or textual aspects were unprecedented but because it lay at the intersection of different relationships of people, institutions, ideas, and objects. The pamphlet is an assemblage to use the current terminology of social theory.⁷¹ The pamphlet was new because the networks that constructed it in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire intersected in new and unique ways, granting it a novel social effect.⁷² Ultimately the empire itself, that is, the Ottoman Empire, formed the most important network for the creation of pamphlets, bringing together both a specific geography and multiple social, political, and material forces in a unique configuration.⁷³ Later chapters will detail some of the most relevant transformations: First, the advent of a pyramid-like hierarchy of appointed judges, jurists, and professors created a class of scholars whose opinions and voices were officially backed by the state. These scholars rarely, if ever, turned to pamphlets. Writers who were sidelined, however, found in pamphlets an alternate venue to publicize their opinions. Second, the growth of educational opportunities led to a multiplication of textual canons and forms of reading at the end of the sixteenth century, and pamphlets flourished in this more diverse and multisited intellectual world. Finally, and perhaps more importantly, the dynasty’s attempts to fashion a Sunni Muslim confessional identity for the empire initiated a long process both by the government and its subjects of transformative reflection and disciplining to ensure that Muslims’ everyday actions conformed to a set of prescribed religious ideals. Taken together, these particular associations turned the risāla into a pamphlet in the seventeenth century.

But what made pamphlets polarizing? In the simplest sense, pamphlets contributed to the polarization of Ottoman society because many were highly polemical. Insults targeting one’s adversaries were not uncommon. Legalists decried their enemies as hypocrites who twisted the Law according to their whims to the point that they were barely Muslim. Sufis called their opponents ignoramuses and obstinate fanatics. Both sides called each other heretics in many different ways. In other words, these works did not constitute a public sphere of rational debate meant to convince readers of the validity of their points but a means of mobilizing partisan supporters.

The circulation of pamphlets also played a crucial role in creating Legalist and Sufi publics. Legalists, especially those from the more popular levels of society, coalesced around the works of Ottoman pietists Birgivī Meḥmed (d. 1573) and Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed decades after these writers’ deaths. Many of these works were fakes, however. They were falsely attributed to the above authors, with every new work expanding and developing their corpus of ideas. The public personas of these authors became essential loci for the social formation of the Legalists; one became a “Ḳāḍīzādeli” or a “Birgivīli,” as their enemies called them, by reading and circulating their works. Pamphlets were especially prone to false ascription because they spread widely thanks to their authors’ celebrity. Moreover, because they were short and minor works rather than major tomes, it was more plausibly believed that they were lesser known but genuine works.

Sufi thinkers, too, united through the circulation of their pamphlets, using them to share arguments in defense of practices like saint worship or smoking tobacco, as the same fights erupted in Damascus, Cairo, Istanbul, Bursa, and many other cities. The difference, however, was that Sufi writers circulated their works as discrete, individual authors. Moreover, they also understood that their opponents routinely falsely ascribed texts to increase the circulation of their works. Claims of fake authorship became polemical debates in and of themselves, and certain pamphleteers, like the aforementioned Nābulusī, developed new forms of saintly authorship to distribute their writings across the empire under a single persona.

The other way that pamphlets also changed the communication order of the empire was by expanding the social class of people involved in public debate. Like nearly all premodern (and many modern) societies, the Ottomans believed that political and religious affairs were only to be discussed by a small, qualified intellectual and political elite and that the voices of the commoners should remain unheard. Pamphlets do not necessarily represent popular voices, but they did provide a means for more middling segments of Ottoman society to participate in these religious-cum-political debates. The popular elements of Ottoman society could be found on both sides of the polemics—both ignorant Sufis and unschooled Legalists were plentiful—but critiques of popular participation were more often aimed at the Legalists. An obsessive fixation with following the Law in every aspect of life was regarded as the province of tradespeople, merchants, and villagers, not the urbane, educated classes.⁷⁴

Pamphlets enabled popular participation because they circulated not only geographically but also socially, having a particular capacity to move through multiple levels of Ottoman society. On the one hand, pamphlets were written and read by well-educated scholars to propose novel legal solutions to new situations and practices. On the other hand, given the brevity and simplicity of pamphlets, they were also accessible to those without the intellectual and financial resources to navigate large legal texts and ideas on their own. Just as the tale (ḥikāye) connected courtly romances to popular adventure stories, pamphlets broadened the appeal and reach of legal information and turned the Law into a space of popular politics.

Popular readers of pamphlets were not only passive recipients of legal arguments but also active creators. In particular, they tended to interpret legal arguments in ways that scholars regarded as remarkably simplistic and wrong. In their critics’ eyes, the popular Legalists reduced complex social and legal issues into binary litmus tests of heresy and faith. Declaring that one belonged to Abraham’s religion was one such practice that became a matter of heresy among vernacular readers. The same types of readers even turned against their own pietistic practices, arguing, for example, that the introspective daily prayers introduced by Birgivī Meḥmed were heretical because they generated the very thought of heresy in the mind. As I demonstrate across multiple chapters, popular, semieducated readers ultimately read and argued differently than learned scholars because they lacked or rejected the training in the linguistic sciences—grammar, logic, rhetoric, and disputation—that served as the theoretical and intellectual foundation of Ottoman scholarship. Popular readers instead practiced “vernacular” forms of argumentation and interpretation.

These popular, vernacular voices, however, have not survived in the written record, not even in pamphlets. We know about them only indirectly through the critiques of better-educated scholars. Reading the pamphlet debates from the seventeenth century often gives one the impression of trying to investigate the many polemical fights of our own time but in the distant future. Imagine researching the early twenty-first century debate over, say, vaccination three hundred and fifty years from now. The glut of chat messages, online videos, social media posts, and their attendant comments from vaccine deniers will have largely disappeared, only to be indirectly mentioned in the sources that will have survived: some strongly worded opinion pieces in newspapers of record and journals decrying the illogical, dangerous (and heretical) arguments of the commoners. The same dynamic can be found in those Ottoman pamphlets that survive today. This is partly a matter of preservation. Pamphlets were ephemeral. Writing in 1656, Kātib Çelebi mentions that over eighty pamphlets had already been written on the debate over the religion of Abraham. Almost none of them have survived to the present day. The same was true in early modern Europe; less than one percent of the pamphlets printed remain today, and the same will be true for internet content in the future, given the costs and labor of hosting and storing data. Only material deposited in stable institutions, like libraries, will have been preserved, and Ottoman pamphlets were not kept unless collected or copied in larger anthologies. The other reason is that popular readers likely employed other genres and formats that were more inflected with oral means of communication, though they certainly did write a lot, too, especially polemical poetry, which I have occasionally highlighted. Finally, not everyone who could write had the authority to become an author—to publish and spread their ideas under their own name and to have others copy their works—and thus the predilection for fake authorship among more middling writers.

Pamphlets thus required Ottoman scholars and intellectuals to acknowledge the presence of commoners in public politics. This could take the form of experiments in mobilization, like that of a future chief jurist of the empire, Minḳārīzāde Yaḥyā (d. 1678), who wrote a pamphlet to energize popular readers against the so-called religion of Abraham. On the other hand, thinkers like Kātib Çelebi argued that the polemics of the seventeenth century was a disorder caused entirely by the unwarranted presence of commoners in the empire’s politics and only a new rule of experts could cure it.

Notes

1. Aḥmad al-Manīnī, al-ʿIqd al-sanī fī mazāyā al-shaykh ʿAbd al-Ghanī, Dār al-Kutub, MS Tārīkh 3985, ff. 13a, 20b. For the carpenter, see al-Nābulusī, al-Ḥaqīqah wa’l-majāz, 1:347.

2. See Nābulusī’s works copied by Ḥasan b. Ṣaliḥ al-Ṣamāqawī in Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, MS Serez 1521, ff. 196a, 232a and the ijāza of Nābulusī to him at SS. Cyril and Methodius National Library, MS Or. 1618, ff. 175b–176a.

3. al-Ghazzī, Intimate Invocations (al-Wird al-Unsī), 508–9.

4. al-Ghazzī, 8.

5. Nābulusī’s poetry was also immensely popular and another of his claims to fame.

6. On the turn to defining religion through daily practices, see Ammerman, “Finding Religion in Everyday Life.”

7. Several scholars in the 1980s wrote about this phenomenon, but the central narrative continues to be that found in Zilfi, “The Kadizadelis”; Zilfi, The Politics of Piety.

8. My concept of a communication order draws and diverges from earlier seminal works. Most notably, the anthropologist Brinkley Messick speaks of the “calligraphic state” as a means of “textual domination” in a society. Messick, The Calligraphic State; Christopher Bayly also elucidates an “information order” of late eighteenth-century South Asia. Bayly, Empire and Information; see also, Chartier, The Order of Books.

9. I borrow a definition of information from Ann Blair and Devin Fitzgerald, “as distinct from data (which requires further processing before it can be meaningful) and from knowledge (which implies an individual knower). Information typically presents itself as discrete reports of supposedly truthful or useful facts or messages that can travel across time and place by being repeated and appropriated.” Blair and Fitzgerald, “A Revolution in Information?,” 244. The emphasis on information excludes traditional questions of cultural history such as the translation of knowledge.

10. Initially, the oral and the written were seen as oppositional categories, but numerous scholars have refuted this view. Ong, Orality and Literacy; for the most relevant refutation, see Messick, The Calligraphic State. Most famously, Carlo Ginzburg’s Friulian miller, Mennochio, demonstrated how the partially educated arrived at radically different interpretations of the same written texts that the educated read. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms. Finally, certain segments of Ottoman society are notably missing from this study. As always, historians have to grapple with the perennial absence of women, slaves, non-Muslims, and rural people in the written sources, and hopefully future studies can shed light on these actors.

11. A small selection of these works includes Darnton, “An Early Information Society”; Chartier, The Order of Books; Johns, The Nature of the Book; Blair, Too Much to Know; Pettegree, The Invention of News; McDermott and Burke, The Book Worlds of East Asia and Europe. There is a gigantic literature on media and communication studies, especially for the contemporary world, but I find less inspiration from this work than that of historians.

12. For the nineteenth century, see Schwartz, “The Political Economy of Private Printing”; Asseraf, Electric News; For the Ottoman period in particular, see Quinn, “Books and Their Readers”; from a European perspective, we can also include Ghobrial, The Whispers of Cities.

13. Eche, Les bibliothèques arabes; Pedersen, The Arabic Book; Berkey, The Transmission of Knowledge; Messick, The Calligraphic State; Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice; Ephrat, A Learned Society; Atiyeh, The Book in the Islamic World; Hirschler, The Written Word; Behrens-Abouseif, The Book in Mamluk Egypt.

14. Erünsal, Ottoman Libraries; Republished as Erünsal, A History of Ottoman Libraries; Erünsal, Osmanlılarda sahaflık ve sahaflar; Sezer, “The Architecture of Bibliophilia”; Neumann, “Üç tarz-ı mütalaa”; Değirmenci, “Bir kitabı kaç kişi okur?”; Terzioğlu, “Where ʿilm-i ḥāl Meets Catechism”; Sajdi, The Barber of Damascus; Sezer Aydınlı, “Unusual Readers”; Sabev, Waiting for Müteferrika; Açıl, Cârullah Efendi Kütüphanesi; Aynur and Artan, Osmanlı Kitap Koleksiyonerleri ve Koleksiyonları.

15. For example, see Fetvacı, Picturing History at the Ottoman Court; Liebrenz, Die Rifāʿīya aus Damaskus; Hirschler, A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture.

16. Schwartz, “Meaningful Mediums”; Chih, Mayeur-Jaouen, and Seesemann, Sufism, Literary Production, and Printing; Schwartz, “The Political Economy of Private Printing;” Ayalon, The Arabic Print Revolution. Reese, Manuscript and Print in the Islamic Tradition

17. The foundational books in this narrative are McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy; Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book; Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.

18. Most recently, see Küçük, Science without Leisure, 27–28; for an insightful critique of the logics of print in the Middle East, see Schwartz, “Did Ottoman Sultans Ban Print?”

19. Ghobrial, The Whispers of Cities; Fetvacı, Picturing History at the Ottoman Court; Ferguson, The Proper Order of Things; Pfeifer, Empire of Salons.

20. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, esp. 115–17.

21. See, for example, Ayalon, The Arabic Print Revolution. Despite the overall narrative of the book, Ayalon is keenly aware of the changing literature on the history of print in the Middle East. Sabev, Waiting for Müteferrika. For a discussion of these questions, see Schwartz, “Book History, Print, and the Middle East.”

22. For a more profound critique of the connection between scale and the concept of modernity, see Stiner et al., “Scale.”

23. This approach is most readily seen in Nelly Hanna’s work, which argues that the explosion of books in seventeenth-century Cairo was driven by the emergence of new bourgeois classes. Hanna, In Praise of Books; in a much more refined manner, this approach also informs Dana Sajdi’s search for a new class of popular readers. Sajdi, The Barber of Damascus.

24. Smail and Shryock, “History and the ‘Pre.’”

25. Johns, The Nature of the Book.

26. Blair, “Information in Early Modern Europe”; Blair, Too Much to Know; Johns, “The Coming of Print to Europe”; Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance.

27. Nguyen, “How Twitter Gamifies Communication.”

28. United Nations Development Programme, The Arab Human Development Report 2003, iv.

29. This ideal has, of course, been contested since the eighteenth century but found its stronghold in the twentieth-century United States. For a good history of this ideal, see Rosenfeld, Democracy and Truth.

30. Zeynep Tufekci argues convincingly that governments now practice propaganda and censorship by flooding us with information rather than restricting it. Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas, 223–60; O’Connor and Weatherall go the furthest in calling for a reimagining of democratic institutions. O’Connor and Weatherall, The Misinformation Age, 93–146, 184.

31. For a study of the role of censorship in the regulation of information in the seventeenth-century Italian peninsula, see Marcus, Forbidden Knowledge.

32. See the recent special issue devoted to the topic and particularly the introductory essay by Steinmetz-Jenkins, “Whose Present? Which History?”

33. Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution; Anderson, Imagined Communities; both base their ideas indirectly on Habermas’s notion of the public sphere, which was translated into English at the same time. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.

34. Filippo di Vivo’s work, for example, has continued to bring together politics and communication. Vivo, Information and Communication; Some of the closest connections comes from the field of archival studies and bureaucratic knowledge. See, for example, Vivo, Guidi, and Silvestri, “Archival Transformations in Early Modern European History”; most recently, see Dykstra, Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine.

35. For brevity’s sake, I have usually cited only one or two copies of each manuscript I use, though, in many cases, there are tens and sometimes hundreds more copies to consult.

36. See, most recently, Necipoğlu, Kafadar, and Fleischer, Treasures of Knowledge; I do this, for example, with the Turkish books in a Phanariot library in Shafir, “Phanariot Tongues.”

37. Hirschler, Medieval Damascus; Hirschler, A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture; Rustow, The Lost Archive.

38. Historians are increasingly using manuscripts as documentary sources. One of the forerunners in this field has been Görke and Hirschler, Manuscript Notes as Documentary Sources; I have expanded and applied this methodology in other articles. See my section in Gratien, Polczyński, and Shafir, “Digital Frontiers of Ottoman Studies”; Shafir, “How to Read Heresy.”

39. Manuscripts from libraries in Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Japan were accessed digitally.

40. Greene, The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, 1–21; Schmitt and Kiprovska, “Ottoman Raiders.”

41. Estimates of Istanbul’s population vary wildly, reaching up to even a million people, but the minimum figure is around 300,000 people in the sixteenth century. İnalcık, “Istanbul”; Greene, The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, 107.

42. It is worth noting that a vibrant written culture could emerge even without cities, as was the case with early modern Saharan nomads’ teaching of Islamic law. See Nouhi, “The Maḥaẓra Educational System.”

43. Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses; Hamadeh, The City’s Pleasures; Hamadeh and Kafescioğlu, A Companion to Early Modern Istanbul.

44. Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire.

45. In the most thorough study of Ottoman subjects’ wealth in the probate sources, Canbakal and Filiztekin observe an inverse U-shape that peaks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries before declining in the nineteenth century. Canbakal and Filiztekin, “Wealth and Demography.”

46. On the fiscal crisis of the Ottoman state, see Kafadar, “When Coins Turned into Drops of Dew”; Pamuk, A Monetary History.

47. Yılmaz Diko, “Blurred Boundaries between Soldiers and Civilians”; for a take on the effect of inflation on Ottoman professors, see Küçük, Science without Leisure.

48. On magistrates, see Atçıl, Scholars and Sultans.

49. Peirce, The Imperial Harem; Bekar, “‘The Ottoman Revolution of 1661.’”

50. Kafadar, “Janissaries and Other Riffraff”; Terzioğlu, “Sunna-Minded Sufi Preachers”; Ivanova, “Armenians in Urban Order and Disorder.”

51. On the potential organization of the people in imperial politics, see Kaicker, The King and the People.

52. For a discussion of these events, see Shafir, “Moral Revolutions.”

53. Karamustafa, “Situating Sufism”; Pancaroğlu, “Devotion, Hospitality, and Architecture.”

54. Kafadar, Between Two Worlds, 76.

55. This migration process is explored in more detail in Shafir, “How to Read Heresy.”

56. The idea of the “confessionalization” of the empire was first proposed by Tijana Krstić and developed with Derin Terzioğlu. Krstić, Contested Conversions to Islam; Terzioğlu, “How to Conceptualize Ottoman Sunnitization”; for the most recent and subtle description of this process, including how it relates to Christian communities, see Krstić, “Can We Speak of ‘Confessionalization.’” Terzioğlu, “Confessional Ambiguity in the Age of Confession-Building.”

57. Terzioğlu, “Sufis in the Age of State-Building”; Yıldırım, “The Safavid-Qizilbash Ecumene”; Gürbüzel, Taming the Messiah.

58. Kātib Çelebi, Mīzānu’l-ḥaḳḳ; For a translation, see Kâtib Chelebi, The Balance of Truth.

59. Kātib Çelebi, Mīzānu’l-ḥakk, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, MS Mihrişah Sultan 440, f. 129b.

60. Again, see Zilfi, “The Kadizadelis”; Zilfi, The Politics of Piety; one response is Shafir, “Moral Revolutions.”

61. Bidʿa is generally translated as “innovation,” but this translation misconstrues an essential aspect of Legalist ideas. See chapter 5 for an extended critique. Similarly, in this book, I use the word “heresy” expansively, but readers should remember that there were numerous terms and concepts for heresy in Islamic thought: e.g., kufr, ilḥād, zandaqa, ridda, etc. Each of these terms had its own particular connotations and specific legal and theological meanings, even if they tended to be used without distinction on the popular level.

62. Regarding the diversity of Islam, see Bauer, A Culture of Ambiguity; Ahmed, What Is Islam?; for a more concrete discussion of this framework in the Ottoman context, see Gürbüzel, “Bilingual Heaven.”

63. For an earlier description of this intellectual world, see Shafir, “Vernacular Legalism.” In that article, I do not use Legalism to denote a social group, but as a means of understanding how law is used outside its formal boundaries.

64. Aspects of Sufism, however, could be spaces for articulating a larger political program. See Gürbüzel, Taming the Messiah.

65. E.g., Fernandes, The Evolution of a Sufi Institution; Clayer, Mystiques, etat et société; Terzioğlu, “Sunna-Minded Sufi Preachers”; Terzioğlu, “Sufis in the Age of State-Building.”

66. Pagani, “Défendre le soufisme,” 319.

67. On the contrary, the name “Legalists” highlights the fact that defining Islam through the Law is not its default or orthodox mode but a relatively new initiative, at least in Ottoman lands.

68. I take this definition from Ivanyi’s masterful elucidation of the thought of Meḥmed Birgivī, one of the intellectual sources of the Legalists. Ivanyi, Virtue, Piety, and the Law, 1, 3, 88–94.

69. On early significations and understandings of the risāla, see Montgomery, Al-Jāḥiẓ, 100–102, 193–201.

70. Halasz, The Marketplace of Print; Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain. I do not borrow much from the literature on pamphlets in early modern Europe besides the term itself and an emphasis on ephemerality. For example, pamphlets in early modern Europe were primarily concerned with news, that is, new political information, whereas Ottoman pamphlets were devoted to debates over new socioreligious practices. Readers should not take my usage of the term as an attempt to project a European or Western model onto a Middle Eastern society.

71. In the past two decades, several related theories have examined how social causation can emerge from a network of heterogeneous elements, both human and nonhuman. This theory goes by several names such as “assemblage” in the work in of Deleuze and Guattari and “actor-network” or “articulation” in the work of Bruno Latour. For the purposes of this book, however, the differences between these approaches are minor. Latour, Reassembling the Social; Delanda, Assemblage Theory; I personally prefer the theoretical framework of the archaeologist Ian Hodder in Entangled.

72. I use the same framework of networks and assemblages to differentiate the Ottoman hajj from its predecessors in Shafir, “In an Ottoman Holy Land.”

73. The point is also salient regarding the networks that shaped the Ottoman experience of the plague. Varlik, Plague and Empire.

74. The designation of commoners or ʿāmme did not necessarily refer to the simplest and poorest of the population but more often to the middling classes who had some means and a bit of education and who still found themselves below the educated professors, bureau chiefs, Sufi shaykhs, and elite palace functionaries.