Ottoman History Podcast - Pamphlets and Polemics in the 17th-Century Ottoman Empire

Episode Date: December 6, 2025

with Nir Shafir hosted by Maryam Patton | The seventeenth century has often been characterized as a period of disorder and religious polemics in the Ottoman Empire. In this podcast, Nir Shafir takes us inside his award-winning new book, which argues that the polemics of the early modern Ottoman world were fueled in part by changes in communication, namely the rise of short pamphlets that circulated easily in handwritten copies. Pamphlets created a new arena largely independent from the institutional centers of knowledge production where people debated everyday questions of the time about what it meant to be Muslim. In exploring the world of Ottoman pamphlets, Shafir also offers a new introduction to the nature of Ottoman education, book production, and reading practices prior to the rise of print and modern state institutions.    « Click for More »

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ottoman History podcast. I'm your host, Marianne Patton, and today I'm delighted to have both a friend to the show and a personal friend near Shafir. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. It's nice to finally be on the other side of the microphone. Near Shafir is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. His research focuses on the histories of communication, religion, and science and technology in the Middle East and early modern Ottoman Empire in particular. As I mentioned, he's a longtime affiliate of the podcast.

He's also served as his editor in previous years, and it's a great pleasure to be chatting with him today about his first book, The Order and Disorder of Communication, pamphlets, and polemics in the 17th century Ottoman Empire. Neer's book looks at the great explosion in socio-religious debates of the second half of the 17th century through the lens not of religious revivalism, as frequently assumed or of economic discontent, but rather the medium of pamphlet writing, which you argue is partly because of their short, easily transmissible nature and weak ties to authority which exacerbated these polemics more than they might have otherwise. I'd like to start, however, with the sizable first. half of the book, which you grouped together in a series of chapters called order, that set up

what you argue the kind of logics of communication and theories about reading and writing and how texts were produced in the first place, which then get disordered in the second half of your book. So I was curious if you could expand a bit more on why you felt the need to basically set down once and for all the practices of manuscript production, book production, questions of print, how Ottoman's read. It was really wide-ranging and a pleasure to read. But it's a struck me as being not the way academic monographs typically proceed. As I point out in the introduction, there's basically a sort of focused argument of the book and then a broader argument. The focused argument looks essentially at these polemics that started sprouting up and around

1620, continued until about 1720, and were pretty unique to the Ottoman Empire and that they were essentially about everyday social religious practices. So we're not talking about debates over the nature of God or some sort of theological construction. We're talking about is it permissible for a Muslim to smoke tobacco? Can a Muslim say they belong to the religion of Abraham? Can they

do this certain prayer or does that make them a heretic? Can they worship the grave of saints? There's tons of these. Katha Chalibu wrote about 21 of them. There's another hundred that could be added and people did add to them all the time. Now, as you pointed out just before, like traditionally this has been

understood as this kind of moment of Islamic fundamentalism, that there's these preachers in Istanbul, riling up the crowds, using their economic discontent to start attacking Sufis and to start these debates. And I say, no, there's actually something else going on here. It's not just Islamic fundamentalism, and I don't think that Islamic fundamentalism explains much, but what we're seeing in the 17th century is a transformation of communication practices, which is why these debates emerge. And that's also how Ottoman elites understood them.

and they understood them as disorder created by the intrusion of commoners or semi-educated people into debates that they had no real say or place in. Essentially, what I want to do then is explain how does a social phenomenon, in this case, like the polemics, connected to communication, especially written communication. Essentially, how do you connect texts to some sort of social experience? And that's actually quite hard to do, especially if you know Ottoman sources. It's very hard to delve into that social world in a convincing and interesting way. And to do that, I realized to really flesh out this world and to understand what these debates were

about, and more particularly the medium in which they were expressed often, which were what I call pamphlets, right? There were these very short, small pieces of writing. Each one was dedicated to one of those debates and gave some arguments for people to use against their opponents or to find support amongst their friends, et cetera. When you want to tie that into a social phenomenon like the polemics, you need to kind of flesh a much broader system out there. And to do that, that's why I can have set out just from the beginning to answer the questions that everyone was always asking me when I was presenting this research.

They might not even know this, but the Ottoman Empire, in most of the Middle East, in the Islamic world, actually just copied books by hand until basically into the late 19th century. Even to the early 20th century, you still find books being copied by hand. So if that's the case, how do you have people sharing ideas, writing things, reading broadly and publicly in a society where there is no print? So I had to, first chapter, I just had to kind of sit down and say, well, this is what a manuscript culture is like. There's some myths about it that are untrue, and this is actually the true limitations of it. Then I sat down and said, well, how do books not just are produced, but then how do they move about?

That's like the second chapter, the circulation of information. Is censorship possible? What did people actually expect? What were their beliefs about how information should circulate or not? And it kept going like that. And then I was like, well, actually, we also don't know, like, there was no book about like how did it were people educated? I couldn't find any serious work telling me how were people educated in the Ottoman Empire because I wanted to understand how did people actually read and what

were the kind of ideologies and ideas about reading and to even to begin to answer that I had to spell out well let me figure out what in the world was going on with education at that time and then was able to write about what's the nature of reading. So altogether what I fleshed on that first part is just as you said it's an order that is like a system a general system of communication what I call a communication order just a way of thinking about how information was regulated or encouraged to move in a society. And that includes everything from, you know, the way people read to the way they were educated, how were they archiving material, how did gossip circulate, you know, how did people learn to write and what was the nature of reproduction of reading or oral accounts, etc.

All this material wanted to think about it as some sort of integrated system of communication. And ultimately, I realized that, just to go back to this question of print, we don't think about it in that way, or at least we don't connect the social phenomenon to the system of communication for the Ottomans because we assume that in a manuscript culture, so much of communication is ultimately local, in person, and limited in the sense. And I wanted to show that actually, it's not true that there is a much more publicly available and capacious vision of communication. And that could create different forms of politics and religious experience as I try to show in the book. Now, I know you're not writing a book about the printing technology

and the lack of the printing it, but you do address it. And I just have, because I relate to this question so much in my own research with clocks and why the Ottomans didn't adopt clocks sooner, even though they were aware of them and had them in their collections and sort of ornate decorative pieces. I'm curious on the sort of modern scholarship side why you think this obsession, shall we say, with the lack of printing is so persistent in modern history of science. What is it about our sort of the way of thinking and of how technology progresses and thus how society ought to progress

creates this normative assumption that without print it couldn't have spread as popularly as widely as it did. I'll say this. I mean, print in many ways is a technology. It's a way of reproducing text mechanically, whether through woodblocks or through a movable type, little pieces of metal. But it's also an ideology. It's an idea that you have to have this particular form of technology

in order to be modern, in order to have certain forms of socioeconomic and intellectual development, and is that ideology a very close tying of, there's certain forms of cultural production that are just impossible without print or mass media, in other forms of mass media, such as radio or telegrams or, et cetera, internet, that I think limits very much our imagination of what societies rooted in manuscript technology can do and what they can be. And is that very close connection between print and modernity, one of the things that this book tries to do is to unravel. How that came about, I think, already in the 17th century

European observers noticed that the Ottomans didn't adopt print. They knew about it. They just didn't want to use it. But it wasn't really, I think, until the late 19th, early 20th century, and specifically in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s under modernization theories, that print really became associated as this cornerstone of the modern world and that therefore the Ottomans had to have something lacking, had to have some sort of cultural impediment that stopped them from being able to adopt this. And so the explanations were always essentially culture. There were, you know, too religious. The religious authorities were against print because a Christian invention, or they didn't, there was an aesthetic attachment to the handwriting, or that the scribes were too organized and

they stopped the development, they stopped the adaptation of print. But none of this is true. We don't actually have any real evidence for any of these theories. My personal suggestion, which I put in this in which I hopefully will be a set of a future project if I can get some funding for it, is that ultimately it says that print was really expensive and not particularly economically flexible. It took a lot of money to start a printing press, and then you had to wait, and then you have to hire a lot of people to make the books. And then once you made, you know, 2,000 copies of a dictionary, you had to wait decades before you could sell them all, whereas the Ottomans just had a completely decommersialized and relatively decentralized

or non-centralized system of book production, where everything was made to order. just to give you, say, an analogy. I remember I was watching a movie once in Italy, and it was a movie by Nanomareti, this kind of Italian Woody Allen figure. In the movie, he goes, he wants to hit on his neighbor. He's romantically interested in his neighbor,

who's a tailor. And so he goes to her and asked her to make a sweater for him. And I was like, why in the world would he go to a tailor to make a sweater? I didn't understand it. And then I realized that until like the late 90s, everyone in Italy, and I think many other parts of the world, like India, you went to a tailor to have your clothes made,

like all clothes were made to order you didn't go and buy pre-made clothes at it yeah i mean there were stores where you could do that but most people worked with their tailors to make clothes now what that means is that all clothes were made to order there wasn't mass mechanical production of clothes in factories that were then sold in stores off the rack right and so and what that is but that doesn't mean that like italy or other parts of the world they're somehow unmodern because they didn't have giant sweatshops creating clothes and buy them in department stores this was just another method, a decentralized, slightly less commercialized method of producing clothes. Yeah, obviously I agree. And I think over the years, I think another element to it that I

think has to play with it is that, you know, manuscript culture is just messy and print gives you an easy out, right, an easy argument for like, ah, this big shift in sort of mass communication. And now we can explain things post print and preprint, right? We have all these fancy terms for books before 1500 and books after 1500 creates this easy periodization. But like with the clocks and senses of time and like with print and manuscript. Producing manuscripts is you know messy and slow and I think for modern historians today it's it's tricky it's hard to engage with that scribal culture because it's so different from what we're used to yeah and I think there's also there's narratives of revolution right we like these narratives of revolution there's

this moment everything was backwards or slow before and then there's a revolution that transforms everything in the course of a few years and society is never the same in communication technology is very clearly fit into this mold of communication revolution, whether that's print or the telegram or internet. But, you know, historians of the book and historians of communication in general have kind of undone those for early modern Europe. But that hasn't really reached the popular level. And I think still that idea of a communication revolution is still central to so much of the narrative of history of technology, especially around communication or writing. I think that's what makes the Middle East kind of interesting is that you just don't have a revolution.

You might have a revolution when paper was adopted back in the year. 800 but even that's not quite clear but you know paper which we're talking about rag paper made from linen rags a technology that was probably taken from buchara gets quickly adopted in bagdad spreads all over this new Islamic empire there's a fluorescence of book culture but then everything like they just continue to basically make books the same way for the next 1,000 years and so you don't have like a revolution you just have the same technology over and over again which is still changing people are changing the way they use books the way the role of books in society there's some changes and paper prices and other stuff, but we have to find new forms of narrativizing that type of change

other than, you know, modern versus non-modern. So speaking of whether there was a revolution or not, you do, though, argue there's something new about this period, right, which has to do with basically writing shorter treatises, right? Pamphlets. Can you expand a little bit on how you're treating pamphlets separately as their own kind of category, even though the term, there wasn't like a term specifically for pamphlet? Presumably, the technology, you know, to bring it back to the technological angle, not that that's the main argumentative force of your book. One could produce pamphlets at any point in this

manuscript book culture, right? But something shifts towards encouraging more and more of these pamphlets. So there's two questions there. Those go basically to the heart of some of the arguments of the book and kind of the hardest conundrum that I had to overcome in the making this argument. And also kind of a major shift that I undertook as I was writing it. I used to write that pamphlets were a sign of like early modernity and a transformation of book culture, etc. and it shows the new vision of whatever Islamic society or early modern Ottoman society in this period. I don't think that as much, and I'm going to try to explain to you how I get around this question, because essentially the technology is not new. Also, the term that they use for pamphlets,

more or less, it's a resala, resale, which literally just means like treatise. It can be even a big book, a small book. It just means like a treatise. So they're not using different words to describe what I'm talking about. I use instead of pamphlet. Now, what is a pamphlet? I define it is something that's short, probably about two to 20 pages, and therefore cheap, because it took relatively little time to copy by hand or to pay someone to copy by hand. They're pretty ephemeral. I don't think that most of them were made to be kept. I think once they outlasted the debates they're mostly disposed of, and in fact, they're preserved in libraries in very unique ways, and they're underrepresented in libraries, I argue. Two, they're about these polemics,

or about these specific socio-religious polemics that animated kind of 17th century Ottoman life. So again, smoking, saint worship, religion of Abraham, a whole variety of other things that were being debated at that time. These are the bread and butter of pamphlet culture, and they discuss them in a legal discourse, right? This isn't, when they're discussing whether it's okay to worship at the grave of the saints,

they're not saying, like, I went to a saint's grave and a miracle occurred to me, or they're not talking metaphysically about the nature of saints. They're just saying, is this okay or not according to Islamic law? I devote a lot of time to this medical procedure called chickpea cauterization, which I'll just explain to you now, but essentially someone had some pain in their body. The patient would go to a doctor, maybe a barber, I don't know. They would take a cottery that is a hot iron, make a hole in the body at the point where it hurts,

and then stick a chickpe inside. The patient would then put a leaf or a piece of cloth on it, bind it. And the whole point in the chickpe was to keep the wound open so that the pus or liquid would come out and that liquid was the harmful substance coming out of the body which was the process of supposedly removing the pain this was a immensely popular topic of pamphlets at the time the question though was not about whether this is medically efficacious it wasn't about like what is the obligations of a society to the ill or something of that it was like is this legal for Muslims to do or not and specifically did this procedure negate their ritual purity

So Muslims have to be ritually pure to pray, to touch the Quran, to do a variety of other things. Now, that purity gets disrupted when something's dripping off their body. Some stuff like water is not going to be a problem, but breast milk, semen, urine, etc., things like that. It negates your ritual purity. So the question was, is this liquid pus negates your ritual purity, or is it just water, which is fine? And then this led to a whole question of, well, because this procedure would be invisible to the person outside, right? So you could be praying at the mosque. A person next to you might be praying.

And you don't know whether or not their prayers are actually valid or not because they've had this procedure. There's this constant moment in which you're doubting all the time in all these things, whether your neighbor is a true Muslim or not. These are pamphids. They're not, say, a legal treatise about any sort of fatwa-like text. These are polemical. They're meant to attack their enemies.

They're about these topics that are always grouped together because you see them in the Majmuas group together. right people were reading about these topics together and they form a very in a sense clear corpus of works that you can find in the archival record to some degree and this is different than let's say resale in general or any other books in general now how do i say that this is all new well it's not new in the sense that there's a new technology or the new genre necessarily what makes it new is that essentially the network of different social effects that came together from the creation of the Ottoman empire made a different social outcome through these texts.

So, like I'm looking at the way that education was formulated in the 17th century, completely different. There's a big split between bureaucrats and mandarsas, etc. This changed methods of reading. This changed the way that people were reading and approaching these texts, also the shift in the confessional nature of the Ottoman Empire, the association of the government with a Hanifi Sunni Muslim tradition, and the pressure on ordinary subjects to follow that.

And specifically, I think most importantly, the fact that we're undergoing in the 17th century, this massive expansion of the political class of empire, that it's moving away from a system, set between 1,400 and 1,600, when the elite was essentially recruited through slavery or through some noble families and that they were running the empire to an elite

that was now freeborn Muslims that was much, much larger than a few thousand people, which is probably 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 people. And these were all freeborn Muslims. And in that situation, in this new form of kind of Muslim Commonwealth that some people have called it, the question of who is and who is not a Muslim becomes increasingly important and salient. And that's why these debates over things like medical procedures or the way you pray or the way you call yourself a Muslim become incredibly important and often tied together in these big

culture war style connections because they're all about who is part of this body politic. I would just say that's kind of my version about what's new about this. That doesn't mean that there's no forms of public debate and other popular literature before. There actually was. I'm sure there was. It's not just short treatises, but treatises that deal with these legalistic questions about basic Islamic practice and sort of who's considered, who can be considered Muslim or not. Yeah, and they're polemical, right. So I want to talk about that polemical point. A few times start your book, you state that

the point of the pamphlets was not to convince the other side. It was to sort of gain followers and sort of spread the message further. I was hoping you could expand on that a little bit more in terms of than to what end, if not to convince people to sort of side with either the legalists, as you call them, or the Sufis. Just to quickly explain. So I argue that the other, let's say, reason why these pamphlets are emerging, because there's also a strong pietistic populist movement emerging, both fueled by kind of middling classes interested in being Muslim in a specific form of Islam

and by more learned scholars. And I call them legalists. Usually in the scholarship, they're called Kada Zadolis. That is, like, fanatical followers of a guy named Kada Zaday Ahmed. And I say, no, that's actually, the Kadazadali term is actually an insult used by their enemies to disparage them. And so if we try to look at, like, what this populist pietistic movement actually stood for,

their closest idea is that the Sharia, the law, with a capital L, is the central moral font from which all Muslims should define themselves and Islam. And that means that other forms of being Muslim like Sufism or saint worship or philosophy or local customs or attachment to the family of Ali are not important or much less important, if not outright heretical. And there was a very strong anti-legalist pushback against that saying, no, actually there's many, many different ways of being Muslim. You can be Muslim outside of a kind of literalist, shariistic view, and that the law itself is much more capacious than they make it out to be, etc. Now, what we

have here is these two sides, they're battling it out, and they're battling it out both in text and also sometimes on the street. Sometimes there's moments in which there's even riots on the street of sorts. And I think those are actually underreported because the sources really don't talk about what happens amongst common people or everyday people. But we know it started growing, started in the 1620s, and it became much more violent and heated over the 1650s 1710s, to the point that, for example, when preachers, you know, were Sufi or anti-legalist preachers moved to, for example, Bursa, they were regularly receiving death threats, people would come into mosques, attacking them, etc. And the Sufis in turn would constantly act, or the anti-legalists would constantly ask the

authorities to crack down. Please execute the people that criticize the saints. you have to stop these people, you have to silence them, they can't keep saying this. Now, all this goes back to how are they using pamphlets in these debates? One of the things I found out, I used to think that there was some sort of kind of polite intellectual exchange where these two sides are reading each other's works in trying to engage with it. But I found almost no engagement textually between these works. In fact, what I found is that these pamphlets, for example, if we look at the example of

like Cairo in the 17th century, there's a strong movement that is criticizing whether Muslims who worship of the grave of saints and, for example, building domes over there or turning them into sites of worship. In the way that they use these pamphlets is to share arguments with each other, with their supporters, to call upon the authorities to crack down. And I think also to try to influence people who had power in the Ottoman legal system, which is particularly the Sheikh al-Islam, so much in the way that kind of social media figures today on Twitter, whether the conservative or left wing are calling upon the government or kind of trying to put pressure on the government to act in certain ways.

That was their method of creating a public discourse and of participating in this. Now, there's essentially two sides to that, right? So the Sufis and the anti-legalists use their pamphlets in that way. The legalists, the more popular populist group, use pamphlets in a different way. So in the context of writing pamphlets and producing lots and lots of pamphlets It's not to convince the other side, but to gain allies and followers.

You have the very important example of Nablusi, who you call a pamphleteer. So I was wondering if you could expand a little bit on what it meant to be a pamphleteer, how he was unique or not within the context of this broader disorder of communication. So one of the figures that I've followed pretty closely now that in my 10-plus years of doing research is this scholar named Abdeghany Anabulsi. he was born in Damascus in 1640 and died in 1730 and he's interesting because he's a figure that essentially made his entire reputation from writing like he became famous throughout the empire just by writing he basically didn't leave Damascus other than a few travels in his 60s he had a very

quick job as like a deputy judge when he was like 21 22 or something and then he quit that and then he just devoted himself to writing initially pamphlets for about like 30 years. And at a certain point, he became so popular between the pamphlets and his other works that apparently the Sultan was writing, but he also had a very large popular following amongst, you know, even peasants in the countryside knew who he was. More important than actually, I have to say the pamphlets is also his poetry. His poetry really permeated society in a very deep way. Now, what's interesting when Nabutsi is that he really took up this role of, like,

polemical champion. He was fully trained in Islamic law and everything. also technically was attached himself to two Sufi orders, not by anything formal. He dreamed himself into that. He said, I received the attachment in a dream for one of them. He understood, I think, more clearly than many other people. And this comes through in his writing just the artifice of some of these arguments

and ideas that people had at that time. Just saying that the reason why everyone's so attached to no Butzi, not just me, but many others, is because he makes new arguments and makes clear the stakes of those arguments in a way that is very rare for someone from the 1600. So he believed that, you know, Islamic law is important. Sufism is nice and important, but Islamic law is not this thing that tells you do this, do that, and you're a good Muslim. No, the Islamic law is capacious.

It can be everything, especially if we understand, like, Islamic law through the interpretation of Ibn Arabi and Ibn Sabine, and these are the figures that he called Gnostics, Mohakakene, etc., is actually this massive, capacious vision of being human. and it's much better than we can ever imagine. Anyways, so he started just collecting questions from people around the empire, first in Damascus, then then Syria in general, and then people were sending them questions like, how do I counter this pamphlet? You know, they're writing from Tekirda, they're writing from Serbia,

they're writing from Bulgaria, from Egypt, from all over. They're just sending them questions. And he, when he chose to, would write a response and then publish it, and then they'd send it out. And in doing so, he basically created a sort of, a network. He became their champion to counter legalist arguments. And he became a sort of figurehead for these people around the empire to use, to say, well, Nabulsi says this. We can trust him because Nabusi wrote it. And in fact, one of the amazing things is that in his hagiography, because he

actually, I think even before he died, he's trying to turn himself into a saint. But it's really his children, his followers afterwards, it turned him into a saint. It's clear that they're obsessed with his like authorship. They're obsessed with just one of the signs that he's a saint is that everyone has his books. Even if you were to go to used bookstore, all the bookstores were used bookstores, you couldn't find anything by him because everyone was always buying them. His books were just in every corner of the land. And there was a reason for that because he actually, I think, kept like an atelier of followers that would just make copies and then send them out. And then the interesting thing is that if you look at his works, so often they don't just end like, you know, a piece to be

upon you, the reader, whatever, please be upon the prophet. They say, like, this was written in this day, at this hour, in this place, in Damascus, and then I'll say this was copied by this person, and usually we'll say this is based off of the rough draft of a copy of a copy of a copy of the rough draft of Nabulsi. So it always goes back to one of his original copies, not every time, but a significant amount of time. And what he's doing is he's creating like lineages of, you know, liable truthful copies that you know came from him and that you know as a reader are really his words in contrast to kind of the more fraudulent falsely attributed work that's circulating out there and all this end with this one story one of the miracles that's recounted in his hagiography is the

story of ahmet al-maqdasi who is his disciple probably in the early 1700s and you know his doubt he doesn't understand how it is that nebulzi can write all the time yet his works in every over corner the empire, like, how is it that he has a social life? He's hanging out with the brothers. He's going for daily strolls in the gardens. He's riding and interacting with the public outreach. He's doing all of this, and he's still managing just to pump out material, and he wants to kind of figure out the master's secret. Nebulsi sees him enter his study where he's writing. He says, Ahmed, go bring me a cup of coffee. Ahmed comes back with a cup of coffee, opens the door. What does he find? He finds 40 copies of Nabulsi, each of them

identical, each on the read pen in the hand, writing an exact copy of the same treatise, or at least a treatise by Nabutsi, Ahmed goes, gets 40 more cups of coffee. When he comes back to take all the cups of coffee back to the coffee cellar, Nabutsi says, Ahmed, don't doubt me. Again, you know, believe that I wrote every one of these copies. First and foremost, what this shows is that Nebulzi was able to project his writings across the empire and that there were reliable copies as if they were kind of his original rough draft, which is the most reliable source of a text in a manuscript culture. And that it seemed like, you know, basically through miraculous work that he was able to create all these copies and that they were all reliable and that they

moved around easily. May we all aspire to be as productive as one 40th, Nebulusi. Yeah. Well, he did in the end write about like three, over 300 works. I don't think that he wrote them all himself, right? I suggest this book that I think he had a sort of atelier, like, people might have, like, sent him a question. And he's like, yo, Abraham, you do, you do the research, blah, blah, blah. And then he, like, kind of put it all together, wrote the rough draft. And that was deposited in Damascus. And his children and his grandchildren were also responsible for, and his great-grandchildren, received official recognition from the Ottoman government until the late 1900s in the early 20th century. They were receiving stipends, an official stipend from the

government for producing copies of his work so they were still supplying copies of his work generations afterwards the time when when academia still paid so to speak well in his great-grandchildren yeah his children got it he got rich right at the end of his life when he fell in favor of the government again You mentioned how the anti-legalists use their pamphlets differently from the legalists. Is this why you find that there was more surviving pamphlets from the Sufi perspective? I think this is a point you made in the later portion of the book. Right.

So the way that, as I said, the Sufis were using them to share viewpoints to find supporters to connect their struggles between Egypt and Anatolia and the Balkans and to show that there was actually an empire-wide movement that's trying to stop saint worship or stop these things. And they saw it all as a kind of interconnected fight. And their pamphlets relied on the authority of the people writing them. So they would say, oh, this guy's a sheikh at al-Lashar. He is a major scholar. He's a major Sufi sheikh in Istanbul, et cetera. And you can identify each of them by their individual authors. The difficulty, though, is when you look at the other side and look at the legalists, you just find many less individuals.

What you find is a whole variety of popular writing, some of it pamphlets, you know, giving arguments against worshiping the saints or why it's heretical, the worship of the grave of saints, against smoking tobacco, against saying, for example, a Muslim belongs to the religion of Abraham. But you also find all sorts of sermons. You find didactic poetry. You find Ilm al-Had's catechisms telling Muslims, these are the basics of which people should believe. And you find in this popular literature, a variety of pamphlets. But the pamphlets are not tied to individual authors. And one of the arguments I make is that they're actually, most of them are falsely attributed. Most of them are fakes attributed to one or two major author figures, those being Kaddizadez,

Ahmed and Birgivi. What we find is that so many of these are attributed to figures like Mehmet, the 16th century pietist or Kadizadezada Mehmed, this early 17th century preacher. but they weren't really their works. And in fact, probably like 80% of Birgivi's treatises, or at least the ones that are attributed to him today in the manuscript record, are not his. And this has been shown by, you know,

a work by Ahmed Kaila and others. And so what we have is this very different culture on the legalis side, where they're just attributing things that would have probably sounded like the work of Birgivi, or sounded like what Kadizadezada of Ahmed should have said, but weren't really his. people at that time knew that. They knew that these legalists were falsifying the authorhood of these

pamphlets and of these works. They thought to spread them further. So why do more pamphlets from the Sufi perspective, so to speak, survive today, do you think? I think it's ultimately because they were often ridden by people with more cultural and intellectual authority and that this is, their works are not, I wouldn't say survive more, but we can more easily find them in the catalog essentially because they have an author they say my name is mehmed son of ahmed son of abdel ghani the you know al-hallabee or whatever like that so you have a title you have a name this can be cataloged easily and we can find it whereas on the legalist side we just have sometimes they don't say the author right and that's why this all gets confused like it doesn't say who the author is they

don't say the title and they're just like okay and then this is like a sermon under the manuscript in the manuscript catalog, you say something like a sermon, a didactic piece of poetry, something about smoking. It's not clear at all what this material is or how it should be cataloged. And that's probably just because the people writing and reading this were also, I think, just much less of cultural elites. They were often probably from the middle in class. Sometimes they're identified as villagers, artisans, people like in the middle levels of the palace, etc. But there's also a lot of scholars attached to them as well. And we have to think that, you know, not everyone coming out of the madrisa is this amazingly educated uridite figure.

There's a lot of people that probably went to the maddhasa, and there was hundreds, thousands of madrasas back in the Ottoman Empire, and they maybe stayed there for a few years, got free housing, food, learned some stuff, and then dropped out and then did a bunch of other random jobs, right? But then you knew how to read and write and got the basics of some scholarship, and that's the type of people that were engaging with this material. But they weren't competent enough. They didn't have the authority to say, like, I wrote this,

and I use my name to put these ideas out there, right? And instead, they might borrow the name of someone like Birgivi or Kadazade, or a future reader might say, well, I don't know who wrote this, but it seems like the work of Birgivi, and then they would attach it to that. Your comment about the nature of how these texts both survive and then are organized by the modern archivist, modern librarian, brings mine two things.

Firstly, a testament to the research. that went into this book and your many, many years in different archives and libraries, to extract these texts, these pamphlets nowadays, are bound together in Mejumaz, but that's not how they would have been circulated or read or consulted at the time. Tying back to the themes of the first half of the book and the order of communication, the order of knowledge, this is a kind of theoretical, hypothetical question, but if you were to sort of reorganize the libraries today that house these manuscripts for scholars, is there a better system that's closer to the original format in which these books were produced,

these texts, not just books, but that isn't understood in the sort of easy authorial format that we privileged today by having a catalog listing, author, title, language, things like that. I think Medemois in particular, you've written about this in other places, sort of defy our tendency to think of a text as sort of one, one author, one text, one entry in the catalog. How would I reimagine the classification system of a library today? Let me start it off like this. let's explain first why it is that we cannot fully comprehend the entire vision of all the subjects and works that were being discussed and all the books that existed in the past from the contemporary Islamic manuscript library. And this ultimately boils down to questions of

survival, what material survived both just in terms of time. So like if we look at maybe the few million manuscripts that exist today, 90% of them are from the early modern period, right? So between in 1,600 to 1850 is like 90% of the manuscripts out there. There's that. But then there's the other problem, which is that libraries just collected specific material. They were not interested in like ephemera. They weren't interested in like everyday stories.

They weren't interested in things like pamphlets. They weren't really interested in sermons. Things that weren't meant to be, you know, rare books that scholars needed. That was their purpose. They were there to provide reference. copies of books for mothers of students or scholars or others who needed access to books that not everyone had. And to preserve them, they would bind them. Right. So unless something was bound together, it was just not deposited into the library. And libraries grew their collections

not by buying new books, but by donations. So we have a situation in which basically the more valuable books or ended up getting donated to libraries. In them, you might find like a group of pamphlets grouped together and bound, and that's what is preserved today. But all the other stuff, for example, I think that most pamphlets actually circulated unbound, like an acquire. And the same with like all sorts of, you know, popular stories or catechisms or all this stuff. There's just a ton of material out there that was very cheap and it just didn't survive to today. And that's the same whether we're speaking about major scholars or smaller scholars, more minor figures. So one of the people I write about this guy, Abu Ahmed Zadeh, who was a supporter of the legalists,

apparently very well-educated and rich guy, but supported legalist positions. Apparently he wrote like 10 pamphlets about tobacco and other things. None of those have survived as far as I know. He has one or two things that survived today. Kathab Sheldby, when he was writing about the debate over the religion of Abraham, whether Muslims can say, I belong to the religion of Abraham as a declaration of faith. He said that there were 80 pamphlets about this topic when he was writing about in 1656. None of those have survived.

Like, they're just giant swaths of material that just don't exist. And so what that suggests to me is that what we're seeing in the manuscript libraries is a small sliver of that world. So I think in the introduction, I'm going to compare it to the polemics today. And it's like, imagine trying to study the culture, war and the polarized and polemical society of, I don't know, 21st century America or 21st century Turkey 400 years from now. What's going to survive? All the YouTube videos, the weird WhatsApp groups, all the comments and all the random stuff on social media, none of that's going to persist.

Like, no one's going to pay for the server space and all this stuff to archive all that. It's all gone. It's already gone. Like things that were on the internet two, three years ago are gone. You can't find them anymore. But what you do have is a bunch of people. people in the New York Times railing against people that are too stupid to be vaccinated and things like that and the dangers of, I don't know, let's take vaccination and coronavirus stuff. You know, every week you'd have some sort of editorial in the New York Times or these newspapers of record that would rant against the people that are too stupid to know what to do and how they're destroying public discourse about vaccination or health, et cetera. And that's, and that's, I think,

a similar situation you have. Let's say if we look at the manuscript record today, about the 17th century debates, we have a variety of scholars complaining that these people don't know how to read, they're attacking traditions, the Salaf, that Muslims have been doing for a thousand years. But they don't know anything. They don't really understand law. They don't understand how arguments are meant to be formed. They don't really understand Islam. They pick up a book and they interpret it any way they want, et cetera. This is a lot of these type of complaints come up and up again and again. On that theme of the complaints against people who don't know how to read, getting involved with these debates, arguing things they should know better about. It reminds me of

one of the figures you discuss in the first part of your book, which I've studied for other reasons, so it was very interesting to see his lens on this theory of reading in the order of society, if you could comment a bit more on his sort of theory of how, if only people could read correctly, then society would be well-ordered and harmonious. And pardon me, couldn't help but feel like, yes, I agree even today. If everyone could read properly, we wouldn't be having all these debates about needless things. In the process of trying to write this book, one of the main questions I kept getting is, well, how did people read? What was going on with reading? And then the same with education and circulation of text. One of the main problems that I was always encountering was

that people assume that there's a sort of generic Ottoman method of reading and Ottoman mentality, and that this defined everything that people in the early modern Middle East did between 1,500 and 1850. And, you know, I said that's not true. There's actually multiple pathways of education, which create different forms of elite and common reading. And we have to take into account all these different forms of reading and to kind of encapsulate the world of elite reading, especially the most prestigious. digist form of reading, which was the read, the kind of analytical reading that developed in the Madrasa, I focused on Munajum Basha.

A Munajim Basha, whose name literally means like chief astrologer, was actually an interesting figure. He, his parents, I found out, were refugees from central Anatolia, who fled and ended up in Salonica, and he actually grew up apparently rather poor. He was working as an apprentice in various shops, but he couldn't damp in his desire to learn. and he kind of attached himself to Sufi sheikh and the local Mufti and learned some basics. And then at an age of like 22, he goes to Istanbul. He needs more advanced study.

And there he basically attaches himself again to the local Mevlovichs and the intellectual scene there. And he kind of educates himself until his sheikh was able to get him placed in the palace as a sort of courtier to Mehmet VIII. And he apparently does very well. He's very good at having conversations. And he's just a very witty. He's a boon companion, a Nadim, right? he's very eloquent and well-liked and most of the time he spends there actually is writing kind of like histories or literary collections for the sultan etc at a certain point he is also

you know fighting for the side of the mevlovies against the legalists not clear exactly where he falls in on all this but he gets retired slash gets kicked out in the fallout after mehemet the force dismissal the sultan and he goes and retires to mecca where he's appointed the head of the mevlovy lodge there And there he starts writing all these really deep scholastic works. One of them, which is the most interesting, and which was brought to our attention by Khaledur Ureheb, is about the nature of reading.

It's probably, it's a fascinating text because it's not just about how we should read. It's also, it gives a theory of the mind. It has a whole sorts of aspects to it that just haven't been explored in depth, and it's only like 30, 40 pages, so it's not that hard to get through. But one of the interesting things in it

is that he basically adopts the men method of reading that was kind of used by Madrasa scholars at that time, even though he himself never attended the Madrasa. But he sees that it's kind of the best, most analytically correct method. And he develops what he calls an adab al-Mutalā, like an ethics or form of reading. And he says, you know, how do I have to explain this, but he says that, you know, you have to read analytically is not something you can just do immediately. It takes years of effort and work and you have to train yourself to look at logical arguments, right? You have to look at how arguments are structured, the types of logic that can be applied to them, whether or not they make

sense in terms of grammar, in terms of prosody, in terms of logic specifically, and how those all fit into the argument. So this is a very different type of what we call deep reading or analytical reading compared to what we do today in the university. If you were to go to history class and you're trying to teach people to read, you're probably teaching them something about looking at like the social context of the author trying to place the arguments historically or something like that. None of that matter to them. They just looked at internal logical structure of arguments and how they work. Now, as I point out, that's not the only method of reading. There was also another method of reading for secretaries, which looked at how to convey information correctly about moral lessons

you can pull out, et cetera, et cetera. But for Monajan Bashi, he falls upon this type of reading and he says, you know, like there's popular reading and if you go down that read, for example, If you read for pleasure, if you're reading for narrative, you've basically doomed your mind, you screwed your brain because that will just lead you to enjoy narrative and you won't be able to think properly. And it's the same thing also. If you're just reading a legal argument

just to figure out whether what you do is correct or not, then you're also doing it wrong. You should look at the arguments. You have to think about whether they're valid, what counters them, how they can be counted, et cetera, et cetera. What kind of proofs are using, the type of proofs, whether this, like, discipline takes in certain types of proof, et cetera. And for him is, like, if you can just teach everyone to argue properly,

then everything else will be okay, society-wise. I mean, I don't know exactly if he was referring to the polemics at the time, but for him, he understood, he understood that basically bad reading leads to bad argumentation, and therefore we should try to find some solution to that. And for him, it was to try to educate everyone in this process of reading. Now, that said, as I pointed out in the book, like his book was not that popular. There's four copies of the left.

That's not nothing, but it's also clear that wasn't, like, adopted in the mother's or something like that. This is not the epitome of everything that a learned scholar knew at the time. It's actually an argument as to an ideology of reading in the role of reading and structure in a society, like some sort of Enlightenment philosoph, you know, he believed that if everyone knew how to argue rationally, then society would proceed correctly

and that there would be more order in that society. Now, that said, the forms of argumentation that he's talking about when he calls like a double bath, not him, but in general, these were, you know, frequently found throughout society at that time, especially during the 17th century. And these defined what people thought, learned reading was and in the process also defined what was poor reading I know he doesn't actually

address the pamphlet literature specifically but that the pamphlet literature departs from the kinds of argumentation he would argue scholars should be using in legal text to make a point right so he for example says he says like if you are reading legal literature just to like get an answer of yes or no about an argument like you're reading it wrong this is actually a bad form of popular reading which diminishes the brain, essentially. And he also says the same thing about reading narratives, right? I mean, like, stories, popular stories, which are probably what most people were reading back then.

Yeah, I've mostly read his chronicles. I'm like, well, okay, fair enough. Yeah, it's kind of funny because he actually spends most of his life writing chronicles and popular stories. And then he's like, no, you know, all of that was trash. That's trash. Throw it out. I just did it for, you know, he must have just done it for the money or for the position,

but not for, anyways. Not for the Nizama Alam. Yeah, like, we don't know. what exactly he doesn't tell us exactly what he's referring to and this is common at the time it's very hard to tie in a text to some sort of social milieu but we can't as I pointed out say that you know he decries kind of popular types of reading and we can find examples of that popular type of reading and so I have another chapter about popular vernacular reading and that's when you know readers just didn't pay attention to things like logic or argumentation they didn't know how

they had bad grammar, they had, they didn't understand the basics of prosody, all these things that basically today are not that important, but would be central for anyone to be taken seriously as a scholar. And so there was this weird pamphlet debate that I found that, again, took me a long time to make sense of. It was about whether a prayer by Mehmed Birgivi, so the 16th century paitists, whether that prayer was an invitation to heresy. itself now the renewal of the faith one yeah yeah this prayer is a bit weird it's essentially from one hundred and sin man abigiv you introduce this prayer as kind of a daily Muslim practice especially amongst legalist circles and you're supposed to say like if i have sinned i reject that

or if i've spoken a word of heresy or heretical word i reject that and i return to Islam and this is like i think you're supposed to say this in the beginning of every day every morning you kind of wake up and say it and then like kind of start the day anew as like a renewed Muslim because you're reflecting in your actions of the past day and then you're rejecting those anything heretical or bad or sinful that you're doing and then you kind of start a fresh now at a certain point this very prayer became suspect in this like larger culture war so some legalists and it's very hard to figure out who but they're identified as turkish speakers usually, probably coming from Anatolia, parts of Egypt that were Turkish-speaking, Balkans, etc.

Muslims started rejecting this prayer. They said by thinking, it's not clear what they believe, because we don't have any writings by them. But their critics said that they argued that by thinking about heresy, by saying, if I have sinned, you, like, created it in the real world. Like you imagined heresy, and therefore you created the reality of heresy. Now, they're critics, which are a bunch of Madrasa-based scholars, were saying, like, no, this is all, like, dumb. You guys are too dumb.

Even though the prayers in Turkish, the scholars are writing in Arabic. And they're saying, like, you guys don't even understand the basics of the conditional. Like, if you have a conditional, like the if, then the following clause can't be, it's like hypothetical. It's not a real reality, right? And they're, like, they kept attacking them on the basis of, like, these guys don't understand grammar. They don't understand logic. They don't understand argumentation. They don't understand any of this stuff.

But they didn't address, like, that's how the scholars attacked them, but they didn't address the kind of underlying issue, which is only one person did. And he pointed it out. He said, like, look, we're living in a time when the Ottoman Empire is losing territory, the infidels are conquering our people. Everyone is corrupt.

Everyone's being, everything's going bad. And it's true. in the late this is all happening the 1680s and 90s they're losing they're losing battle after battle against the hapspricks like there's constant revolts and rebellions everything is falling apart seemingly and like you have to wonder like why are the bad guys winning well maybe it's something we're doing maybe we're not really being true Muslims and therefore maybe even the prayer we thought we were doing as Muslims to purify ourselves is actually inviting us to sinfulness or whatever heresy so we see this kind of breakdown where it's just these scholars just can't address these

they can only address the fact that they can't read well they're like you guys don't know grammar you don't know logic that's why you guys are stupid but that's not at all the problem and the problem was that for some reason this popular attack on this prayer like had gained prominence and it just couldn't be controlled and these scholars were trying to push it back down by insisting that it was that they read the proper way well thank you so much Listeners, as always, you can find more information, including a bibliography, at our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com. Nair, thank you so much for both this fantastic book and also this conversation.

It was a real delight to chat with you. Thank you, my. Thank you.