Ten experts in premodern literature and history examine the style, genre, and performance of sixteenth century Ottoman poetry. A large number of poems, including a newly discovered imperial poem collection and the work of a poet fallen into oblivion, are discussed with regard to their multifarious functions and their contemporary lyrical appeal. Though most of these poets worked in conventional settings many of the articles in this volume point out how they broke taboos, glossed over violence, and promoted or questioned political rule, even as they appealed to their listeners on an emotional level. The authors provide ample evidence for the importance attributed to certain cities and places, as well as local affiliations and networks. These analyses show how premodern poetry operated as a tool of communication and formed an integral part of premodern social and political life.

Ten experts in premodern literature and history examine the style, genre, and performance of sixteenth century Ottoman poetry. A large number of poems, including a newly discovered imperial poem collection and the work of a poet fallen into oblivion, are discussed with regard to their multifarious functions and their contemporary lyrical appeal. Though most of these poets worked in conventional settings many of the articles in this volume point out how they broke taboos, glossed over violence, and promoted or questioned political rule, even as they appealed to their listeners on an emotional level. The authors provide ample evidence for the importance attributed to certain cities and places, as well as local affiliations and networks. These analyses show how premodern poetry operated as a tool of communication and formed an integral part of premodern social and political life.

In Making Sense of History: Narrativity and Literariness in the Ottoman Chronicle of Naʿīmā, Gül Şen offers the first comprehensive analysis of narrativity in the most prominent official Ottoman court chronicle

How Turkish poetry became the preferred mode for communicating, debating, and shaping political and social experience in the early Ottoman Empire Occasions for Poetry is a history of how Turkish poetry became the preferred mode for communicating, debating, and shaping political and social experience in the early Ottoman Empire. After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Ottoman elites at the imperial court turned to poetry to craft distinctive modes of expression in order to articulate their own place within the Ottoman sultanate. Placing Ottoman court poetry in its social and historical context, Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano argues that poetry functioned as a political act. Aguirre-Mandujano examines the occasions that compelled the Ottomans to compose poetry, to present it to their superiors, to share it with their peers, and to spend considerable efforts and time to make poetry often and to make it well. He explores how scholars and bureaucrats interacted with each other through poetic imagery, revealing how literary language affected bureaucratic practice. Poetry was not only an artistic activity, but also a means to advance or save one’s own political or bureaucratic career. For the Ottoman elite, poetry was more than a creative activity or a flattering description of Ottoman power and expansion; it was a vehicle to shape and mold their social reality. The language and genres created and used by these early modern Ottomans would define both a literary tradition and the shape of imperial politics and power for almost six centuries, until the end of the empire in the twentieth century.

For centuries, people moved between the Ottoman Empire, Eastern Europe, and Iran. This book studies the biographies of individuals and groups as different as rulers and revolutionaries, frontier bandits and merchants, soldiers and slaves from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Following their journeys across borders, the case studies of this volume emphasize the profound effect that mobility had on the lives and thoughtworlds of everyone with a Transottoman trajectory. The chapters reveal breaks, adjustments, and continuities in people’s biographies and the in-betweenness that moving typically created.

How widespread was authorship among rulers in the premodern Islamic world? The writings of different types of rulers in different regions and periods are analyzed in this book, from the early centuries in the central lands of Islam to 19th century Sudan. The composition of poetry appears as the most fertile area for authorship among rulers. Prose writings show a wide variety, from astrology to bookmaking, from autobiography to creeds. Some of the rulers made claims to special knowledge, but in all cases authorship played a special role in the construction of the rulers' authority and legitimacy. Contributors: Ahmed Ibrahim Abushouk, Sean W. Anthony, María Luisa Ávila†, Teresa Bernheimer, Philip Bockholt, Sonja Brentjes, Christiane Czygan, David Durand-Guédy, Anne-Marie Eddé, Sinem Eryılmaz, Maribel Fierro, Adam Gaiser, Angelika Hartmann†, Livnat Holtzman, Maher Jarrar, Robert S. Kramer, Christian Mauder, Matthew Melvin-Koushki, Letizia Osti, Jürgen Paul, Petra Schmidl, Tilman Seidensticker.

The examination of literary genres in the Middle East opens the possibility of gaining new insights into the intellectual universe of Middle Eastern societies, the question of production of meaning, what “literature” meant in different historical periods, and the underlying epistemology of producing knowledge, and how this epistemology has changed over time. This book comprises 12 case studies from the three major Middle Eastern languages – Arabic, Persian, and Turkish – written by experts in the field. It brings together a wide range of approaches – from the study of epics to an analysis of travelogues, and from classical poetry to novels. Instead of focusing on one period or juxtaposing the classical genres and the West-induced development of “modern genres,” the studies in their totality apply a broad diachronic and synchronic perspective, with the potential to create a comparative framework for the study of the sociocultural and narratological dimensions of genre in the Middle East.